OPINION: Myths and misinformation about CO2 and climate change

 The Nov. 8 guest op-ed by Robin Sterrett, a retired mechanical engineer from Colstrip, includes factually incorrect and misleading claims about CO2 and climate. Sterrett refers to those claims as “real news” that he or she apparently found on some web sites. But that “real news” has absolutely no basis in fact, and is certainly not real and, if anything, is nothing but fake news.

For example, Sterrett claims that too much CO2 in the atmosphere decreases the amount of oxygen and that increasing CO2 or other gases in the atmosphere isn’t and won’t be a problem until it causes breathing problems. What Sterrett seems not to know is that increasing CO2 has no direct effect on oxygen or on any other gas in the atmosphere and there is no physical basis to even expect such an effect.

The 43 percent increase in the concentration of CO2 over the past 125 years has obviously reduced the fraction of total molecules in the atmosphere that are oxygen, but this increase has not caused a reduction in the oxygen concentration. Further, before higher CO2 levels would cause breathing problems, its concentration would have to increase by more than 100 times its current level, whereas problems of climate change and ocean acidification due to the human-caused increase in CO2 since the beginning of the industrial era are already occurring. So what Sterrett calls “real news” is, in reality, completely false.

 Sterrett also seems to believe that CO2 can’t be important to climate based on the fact that it makes up only a small fraction of all gases in the atmosphere. This is a myth often repeated by deniers of human-caused climate change.

The fact is that the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere compared to all gases is a false and highly misleading indicator of its effect on and importance to climate. This is not a matter of controversy or debate among climate experts. It is a long-settled fact dating back to the 19th century. If the atmosphere contained no CO2 — which makes up less than one-tenth of 1 percent by volume of all of its gases — the Earth would be an ice-covered planet.

Sterrett also claims that forest fires and volcanos emit more CO2 than coal-fired power plants. Based on believing both this and that CO2 is not important to climate, Sterrett chooses not to believe that such power plants could affect the weather, and therefore by definition, also the climate. Here again, Sterrett demonstrates complete ignorance of widely documented and accepted scientific evidence and facts that are readily accessible to anyone interested.

Both forest fires and volcanos are known natural sources of CO2, but they are minor compared to emissions from human activities, especially the burning of coal and other fossil fuels. Moreover, there has been no net increase in CO2 emissions from any of these or other known natural sources that account for the 43 percent increase in CO2 globally since the industrial era began. Only human-caused emissions, including those from the Colstrip power plants, account for this increase. Further, this increase is the primary cause of the observed climate changes and ocean acidification since the 1970s. These are also not matters of uncertainty or debate among experts.

The inconvenient reality is that humans have already (and unavoidably) committed the climate to change even more for decades to centuries into the future because of the elevated CO2 currently in the atmosphere due to their past and current emissions. As a consequence, there will be continued global warming of the atmosphere and oceans, sea level rise, Arctic sea ice loss, glacial retreat, loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet, and winter snow-pack decline. Also, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will continue to increase.

These and other ongoing and projected human-caused changes pose significant risks to humans and the environment, and unless CO2 emissions are substantially reduced, these risks and the cost of dealing with them will only increase.

Sterrett should download and read the joint report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society (http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/exec-office-other/climate-change-full.pdf) to learn what experts say about the basics of climate change, including the evidence, causes, and some of the consequences.

Elwood, of Kalispell, is the retired director of the Climate Change Research Division in the U.S Department of Energy’s Office of Science.