‘The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes.’

(Freeman Dyson, Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society, Frederick S. Pardee Distinguished Lecture, November 1, 2005, 8)

Humans don’t create carbon dioxide; they simply recycle some of it. 

Once that is understood, the role of carbon dioxide in regard to climate change can be put into perspective. Since the formation of the Earth, many carbon compounds, from the pure form, diamonds, to the trace atmospheric gas that is essential to all life, have been expelled from the interior of planet Earth to the surface. Scientific literature is replete with graphs depicting the progressive depletion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years. Much of this has been captured in readily available and abundant fossil fuels.

All life is dependent on carbon dioxide, an invisible, odourless, non-polluting, heavier-than-air plant-nutrient. The CO2 Coalition, established in 2015 as a non-partisan education foundation to educate thought leaders, policymakers, and the public, reports that:

‘Contrary to the oft-repeated mantra that today’s CO2 concentration is unprecedentedly high, our current levels of carbon dioxide are at near-historic lows. The average CO2 concentration in the preceding 600 million years was more than 2,600 ppm, nearly seven times our current amount and 2.5 times the worst case predicted by the IPCC for 2100.’

We are thus experiencing a CO2 drought, more pervasive and threatening to life on Earth than water droughts. Water droughts occur in short-term cycles as in the Biblical seven years of feast and seven years of famine (a cycle that the use of hydrocarbon fuels has overcome), but a carbon dioxide drought is a long-term looming issue (that can also be met with the wise use of the vast depositories of coal, oil and gas that should be utilised, not locked away under superstitious, unscientific rules and regulations).

The quantities of fossil-fuel energy-banks (coal seams of solidified sunlight) are breathtakingly vast. For example, the big coal mines in the Bowen Basin are of Permian age, which goes back 240 to 290 million years (my), but the Walloon coal deposit seams in the Surat Basin in eastern Australia are over 12 metres thick and are of Jurassic age (135–200 my ago). Coals of this age exist also in other parts of Queensland and are common worldwide. We also have Cretaceous coals in Queensland and elsewhere (65-135 my ago) – still within the dinosaur period. Massive amounts of ‘brown coals’ (lignite) exist in Victoria (Yallourn and Loy Yang power stations), and in South Australia, and in other parts of Australia, deposited about 10-65 my ago. In Australia, we have an abundance of coal – thousands of years of supply at our present mining rate.

Australian drillers have recently discovered two 90-metre-thick coal seams in Mongolia. It takes approximately 10 metres of foliage to make a metre of peat, and 10 metres of peat to make a metre of coal. It is difficult to comprehend the eons of solar power collected through the miracle of plant photosynthesis that lie beneath the surface, but which are being locked away through political chicanery. Before humans use a fraction of these resources, newer and cleaner forms of energy based on the power of the atom will surely have been developed, but such advances will not come by candlelight.

Coal is the primary heavy-duty electrical energy source that propelled mankind from subsistence living and still underpins the world economy today. Its efficiency, though, is being undermined by regulatory imposition of the duplicitously named ‘renewables’ in pursuit of impossible Net Zero targets, but coal remains the fuel of today, and is the fuel that will allow a smooth transition to the fuel of the future, safely harnessed power of the atom. Hopefully, it might also generate wealth and release energy to facilitate the disposal of dead wind turbines and solar panels, the detritus of a temporary mass delusion that weak, intermittent wind and solar energy can be efficiently harvested in amounts sufficient to reliably replace the energy-on-demand that feeds every light switch and power point.

By extracting some CO2 from fossilised remains of past atmospheric CO2 and recycling it into the atmosphere from whence it came, mankind benefits from the energy released, and replenishes vitality in the air to help re-green the planet. Despite the demonstrable role played by carbon dioxide in greening and sustaining plant life, there are controversies and debates about how much CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic and how much is naturally occurring. For example, Terry Gerlach confidently states that, ‘Research findings indicate unequivocally that the answer to this frequently asked question is human activities.’ In a paper, entitled Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide, he argues, ‘Anthropogenic CO2 emissions … clearly dwarf all estimates of the annual present-day global volcanic CO2 emission rate.’ But if CO2 levels have been much higher in the past without causing the planet to overheat, this is surely prima facie evidence that the source of the carbon dioxide is of academic interest only… The more we can return to the atmosphere, the healthier, the greener, the planet.

The entire UN/IPCC campaign against carbon dioxide is built on demonstratively faulty computer modelling and committee decisions driven by self-interest of largely scientifically illiterate delegates at annual Conferences of Parties. But a massive volcanic eruption in Tonga two years ago has turned climate prediction models on their collective ears. In the largest such event since the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, the effects of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in January 2022 are still being felt in weather patterns across the world, and the disconnect between carbon dioxide levels, whether from natural causes or human recycling, and surface temperatures, unequivocally proves that atmospheric carbon dioxide is not the cause of climate change, but a residual of millennia of volcanic emissions.

The El Niño effects have been observed for centuries, as explained by National Geographic:

El Niño was recognised by fishers off the coast of Peru as the appearance of unusually warm water. We have no real record of what indigenous Peruvians called the phenomenon, but Spanish immigrants called it El Niño, meaning ‘the little boy’ in Spanish. When capitalised, El Niño means the Christ Child, and was used because the phenomenon often arrived around Christmas. El Niño soon came to describe irregular and intense climate changes rather than just the warming of coastal surface waters.

La Niña is described by the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology:

La Niña occurs when equatorial trade winds become stronger, changing ocean surface currents and drawing cooler deep water up from below. This results in a cooling of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The enhanced trade winds also help to pile up warm surface waters in the western Pacific and to the north of Australia.

However, ocean surface currents, piling up warm surface waters, and ‘upwelling’ of cooler deep water were unsatisfactory explanations for the functioning mechanism of these phenomena and could not explain the heat blobs that caused mass deaths of marine life. This can only be explained by sub-sea volcanic releases of heat and matter from the hot mantle.

Over 20 years ago, a Queensland mining engineer, Robert Arthur Beatty, correlated increased seismic activity in South America with increased rainfall on the East Coast of Australia, with a time lag. This was described in his seminal booklet Planets, Satellites and Landforms. The Humboldt Current – also known as the Peru Current – sweeps up the coast of Chile, then hangs a left below the Equator and sweeps across a highly volcanically active submarine trench past the Galapagos Islands to reach the east coast of Australia a year or two later – no mere coincidence that there is resultant increased rainfall and cyclonic events. When there is more sub-sea volcanic activity, the ocean will experience more heat. In turn, more heat triggers more heat dissipation via cyclones and rain depressions. Oceanic heat blobs do not come from a trace gas in the atmosphere or intermittent sunshine warming a few centimetres of the surface of the waters as the Earth rotates – cloud cover permitting.

Painstaking, pioneering work by Professor Wyss Yim of the University of Hong Kong in collecting and correlating volcanic activity, particularly the more numerous but lesser-known and little-understood sub-sea events, provides the essential link with volcanic eruptions that are affected by cyclical gravitational and electro-magnetic stresses on the surface crust, the solidified skin that envelopes the molten mantle. As the giant gyroscope of planet Earth spins around the Sun, precessional forces compete as the core beats to a different drum and the magnetic poles migrate around the inertial true North and South Poles. The Earth’s crust is thinner beneath the oceans and there are hundreds of thousands of sub-sea vents that allow hot magma to influence the ocean currents that drive surface weather and rainfall patterns. Healthy scientific debate is ongoing regarding the influence of volcanic activity versus solar influences on the climate, but this paper is focussed on the fact that a trace gas in the atmosphere controls neither, and that it may be recycled with great benefit to life on Earth, without causing the much feared and over-hyped ‘global warming’.

There are indeed many fissures in the sea. Blaming carbon dioxide and attempting to regulate this harmless gas and predicting surface temperatures using computer models based on pretentious carbon dioxide emissions targets is the ultimate scientific charade. Excellent research work has also been done on the benign and beneficial effects of atmospheric CO2 by eminent scientists, Emeritus Professor William Happer of Princeton University and Dr Patrick Moore, Past President of Greenpeace Canada, who bring a clear spotlight on the futility of attempting to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

Hence, the answer to the question, whether volcanic activity or anthropogenic carbon dioxide is more responsible for an increase in temperatures on Earth is that it simply does not matter. The ideological one-sided pursuit of blaming an essential gas is destroying and trashing the principal source of the hydrocarbon energy on which the survival of mankind depends. Net Zero is a time bomb that must be defused before the blind pursuit of this impossible dream causes more economic devastation.

In an attempt to better understand the formation of the Earth, China has commenced a deep borehole drilling program. Had we spent the funding wasted in the mass-hysteria-led ‘renewables’ programs on hardening our defences against natural catastrophe and better researching the anatomy of our home in the wilderness of space, we would not today be facing the shut-down of industry in Western nations and skyrocketing costs-of-living crises.

Once the role of carbon dioxide in regard to climate change is put into perspective, and this gas given a fair trial, it will be found innocent of all charges of ‘pollution’ and driving ‘global warming’ and we can take a deep breath that we have escaped yet another bout of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

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John McRobert is a civil engineer with over 60 years of experience in the design, construction and maintenance of major infrastructure, and the study of extreme natural events on manufactured structures. He founded CopyRight Publishing in 1987 to facilitate informed debate, publishing over 200 books, including seminal volumes by geologists and engineers on major Earth seismic events.

Gabriël A. Moens AM is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Queensland and served as pro vice-chancellor and dean at Murdoch University. He is the co-author of The Unlucky Country, Locke Press, 2024

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