PLASMA PHYSICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

In a conversation with his mother, my son told her that he feared the end of the world was coming. It seems to be common among young people nowadays who are fed a constant guilt trip about what awful things we are all doing to our planet. In my young days, I was only afraid of the Russians blowing us up with nuclear weapons, … as if that was ever going to happen! Back then the other big fear was of our running out of oil. For that, I decided to do physics and help to bring about fusion power and on and off in my career, I did make some small contributions to this area. In particular, I have always been interested in plasma physics or more particularly plasma chemistry. The stuff of ionized gases whether in fusion reactors, or the ionospheres of earth and planetary moons. Another, related area, that gripped my attention, was that of lightning and in particular, Ball Lightning. A phenomenon that is gradually being accepted as real with even a preliminary understanding of how it is produced. Maybe not as to how it hangs around for seconds at a time.

Someone gave me a textbook on planetary lightning and a few years back, I spent my July on the beach in the Basque country, reading through it. Lightning is known to all so it would be normal that we would know how it is produced. In the book there were five different mechanisms proposed, but none of them was convincing. Fundamentally, there was a lack of basic plasma physics there.

But then what about plasma physics itself. There are lots of people who develop models of plasmas such as those used for making semiconductor chips. Obviously, a major subject for academic and industrial study. But when you read these studies, that involve countless chemical reactions between ions, electrons and neutral atoms and molecules, you ask yourself, where did they find the data that go into these models? Invariably from previous publications, that quoted previous publications that in fact guessed at what they thought the rates of these reactions would be. As to the products of these reactions, that is usually an even a greater leap of faith. The very annoying thing is that people like me, spent their careers measuring these rates but the users failed to search for them in the literature. So why am I whining about this? Well because sometimes their guesses are wrong and so their models are wrong.

?Well coming back to today’s great fear, global warming, there are a myriad of models on how carbon dioxide is responsible for this warming. And when you have a planet like Venus with a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, you have a super greenhouse effect with temperatures in the hundreds of degrees centigrade, well there you have it! (Voila as the French would say!). It should however be remembered that Venus is much closer to the sun.

Certainly, if our atmosphere did not contain 410 parts per million of CO2, our planet would have a surface temperature of about -18°C. So, in fact CO2 is our friend not our enemy but of course you don’t want your friend to be too pushy so we should limit the amount of it up there.

But when you look at the models, do they take in all the effects. The arctic is melting but not because of CO2. It’s because of the deposition of black carbon particles from combustion that changes the reflectivity (the albedo) of the ice. I used to look at railcars for heavy oil transport and they were painted black, so that the sun’s rays would be absorbed, and this would warm the oil, keeping it liquid. Cars that transported gasoline were nice and shiny to reflect away the sun’s heat.

?A new study has just come up with the amazing result that the increase in hurricanes in the west coast of the United States, is not due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere, but rather, the decrease in industrial pollution, that dumps shiny particles into the atmosphere that reflect away the sun’s rays?

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/us/air-pollution-atlantic-hurricanes-climate/index.html

Maybe we should put more of them up there, but in fact we have now banned high sulfur fuels for shipping and the decrease in sulfate particles will contribute even more to global warming. In fact, by eliminating high sulfur fuels, we are playing with climate modification that people generally see as a no, no!

?So, with all these models of global warming, are we using the right data, or rather are we including all the phenomena? I don’t know. But we should be careful when “experts” make sweeping statements. Remember the good advice the “experts” gave us in the early days of the Covid pandemic.

When you say that we are faced with the “End of the World”, think about the psychological effect on our young people who will see what happens in fifty years’ time. I see the climate is changing but is the answer just that simple… blame it all on CO2? Let’s show a bit of optimism. Let’s be a bit humbler and look for solutions. It is a multi-factorial problem and there are perhaps different ways to tackle the problem that have not even been tried yet.?