Finally some sanity has come from Europe on the subject of climate and it is from a real scientific heavyweight to boot.
Christian Gerondeau, a well-known French scientist and engineer, with more than ten books to his credit, has just published in English one of the most devastating, lucid and convincing books on the climate debate. It is a short book, just about 150 pages, and it comes at the heels of the French edition of the book, which made the best-seller list there under the title CO2: Un Mythe Planétaire.
It would be a serious mistake to judge the book by it size, considering the myriad pages that have been published by both the pros and the “skeptics” including the UN IPCC, a top-heavy scientific cabal of climate “experts,” their detractors and, of course all the alarmist politicians of the world, headed by Al Gore, Barack Obama, and a cadre of European and Australian leaders. Had it not been for the stance by China and India but also the ongoing economic crisis, only God knows what the world may have escaped in the fiasco in Copenhagen late last year.
Gerondeau, a former scientific adviser to French Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, poses just five simple questions in this book. And it would be great if all reasonable people, on either side of the global climate debate, pause for a minute to contemplate them. (Unless of course the polarizing, highly ideological and acrimonious debate of the last few years, has poisoned everyone’s minds. Personally, I admit that I have grown to have little tolerance for climate alarmism but I still have enough of an inquisitive mind to be persuaded otherwise in the climate science.)
Gerondeau does not take a real position nor does he seem to care much about the anthropogenic contribution to climate change. But he deflates both sides on the effects of emissions, mine included, as actually irrelevant. His questions:
Question 1: “Is it possible that mankind would leave any oil, natural gas or coal that would be economically exploited in the planet’s underground?”
Question 2: “Is it possible to stop mankind’s use of oil, natural gas and coal resulting in the release of CO2 when burned?”
Question 3: “Is it realistic to try to prevent the continued increase in the concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere?”
For all three questions, the answer is an unequivocal no. For obvious economic reasons even if the developed world gets together, as attempted first in Kyoto and last year in Copenhagen, to put mandatory limits or stops on carbon emissions, the developing world headed by China and India, and not just them, will continue to burn fossil fuels. The overall production of CO2 and its concentration in the atmosphere will not change from its current trends. Gerondeau, like me, has grave doubts of the feasibility of sequestration and he goes further to say that the current official wish in Europe and the United States to halve CO2 emissions by 2050 from the current level and therefore to a quarter of the current trends is just “wishful thinking”.
What is his take on the future of the planet becomes clear with the next two questions.
Question 4: “Will CO2 emissions continue indefinitely?”
Question 5: “Are we heading for disaster?”
Again the answer to both questions is a no. Since most emissions are the result of burning fossil fuels, their peak will bring about the eventual exhaustion of these fuels and their emissions. He thinks this will happen by the end of the twenty first century. For the catastrophe Cassandras he has this to say. “In the distant past, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been… twenty times what it is today and life on earth was not harmed. No serious examination backs the apocalyptic predictions we are fed daily about the consequences of the inevitable increase in the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere. We are told so many obvious falsehoods… which have no basis in scientific truth that is hard to trust those who express them.”
In a methodical and classic engineering and scientific mode, Gerondeau continues in the rest of his book to demolish myth after myth in stunningly simple and, at times witty, prose.
He also has some very important endorsers. Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and earlier Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy wrote the introduction to the book. But even more gratifying, amid the herd mentality of world leaders evident the last few years, was to see former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing write in the Preface: “This book has the virtue of helping us question generally accepted ideas and perhaps discover more realistic solutions for the future.”
An elegant endorsement for a compelling and elegant book especially because it has this message: let’s stop this pointless debate and let’s do something useful.
