Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
equal to 100 %. An often-occurring practical consequence is the high air humidity
and undesirable moisture conditions in cellars whenever the basement of a building
is not perfectly isolated from the surrounding soil.
Another difference in composition of soil air is its increased content of CO
2
fre-
quently accompanied by a decrease in oxygen concentration. Although this relation
was earlier not well traceable, present-day scrutiny shows increased interest. The
possibility that extreme increases of CO
2
concentration in soil air could lead to less
favorable conditions for agricultural plants has not yet been satisfactorily resolved.
The other aspect frequently repeated by climatologists is the role of CO
2
emissions
from the soil upon recent climate change. However, we do not consider this hypoth-
esis to have been properly developed, nor has it been checked, proven, and demon-
strated by full-size experiments performed by nature itself.
Theoretically we know that climate change is caused by the variation of at least
seven factors. If we exclude those acting on a very long time scale, we meet four of
them acting on the time scale of the last 200 years. They are (1) changing solar
activity, (2) fl uctuating geomagnetic activity, (3) rearranging sea streams, and (4)
varying concentrations of greenhouse gases, mainly of CO
2
. We know more or less
exactly how each of them could cause climate change if each of the remaining three
factors is kept without change. When we plot such a graph, we obtain, e.g., a rising
curve between climate change and each isolated factor as a function of time. When
each is plotted we obtain
I
(1),
I
(2),
I
(3), and
I
(4). However, if two or more factors
are changing at the same time, we are not allowed to simply add them together, such
as
I
(1) +
I
(2), since process (1) infl uences process (2) and process (2) infl uences
process (1) according to the rules governing a domain in irreversible thermodynam-
ics. In most complicated situations, it could happen in climate change that process
(1) will infl uence all three remaining processes. We are inspired by the Onsager's
reciprocal relations in irreversible processes. This theory says that when two or
more irreversible transport processes take place at the same time, the processes may
interfere with each other. In analogy, the same is valid according to Onsager for
chemical processes. Above, we were extending the theory to processes in nature
like climate change, and just addition of curves in graphs is not valid. Simply say-
ing, processes in nature are a lot more complicated, and in majority of instances all
our recent models are limping on both legs, and we are not allowed to derive the
change of climate just from the change of CO
2
concentration. This is our theoretical
objection and this is also our explanation why up to now the predictions differ from
the measurements.
Our own experimentation with the planet Earth and its atmosphere is not possi-
ble. But we do appreciate nature itself for providing evidence of climate change and
the concentration of atmospheric CO
2
. Just for briefness we restrict our discussion
to Holocene (the last 14,000 years) temperature and CO
2
concentration data obtained
from ice samples gained by drilling in Antarctic glacier stations. There were about
nine cool and nine warm periods. Similar, usually less frequent climate fl uctuations
were ascertained for other regions, and in many instances, the change of CO
2
con-
centration was not the cause of climate change but was merely the consequence of
climate change that had arrived earlier.
