"In Plunderers of the Earth, Julius Ruechel tells the tale of how complex political and ecological systems unravel — often in tandem — whenever a society embraces centralized decision-making, empowers a masterful administrative state, and thereby creates perverse incentives that gradually hollow out once-thriving civilizations. But because these processes work on a different timescale from the speed at which impatient humans live their lives, few can see the slow but relentless forces eroding the foundations of civilization, and fewer still recognize the implications.
No academic discipline is a better example of the corrupting influence of politics than the field of climate science. The crusade against carbon dioxide that has emerged from the toxic marriage between science, politics, and corporate interests not only serves as the “noble lie” upon which to build a new global social order — and to grease the wheels of a wholly artificial $5 trillion (and growing) “green” global economy — but in an echo of the destructive forces set in motion in the lead-up to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s by another now-discredited climate theory (“the rain follows the plow”), today’s erroneous climate theory is once again preventing us from recognizing an altogether different and very real ecological story unfolding right beneath our feet that has gone largely unnoticed even as our misguided climate policies accelerate that ecological crisis and block its solutions."
In his Substack post, Sep 6, 2024, Julius Ruechel explained:
Most of the lies hollowing out our world contain some distorted kernel of truth — they often only become lies as they are stripped of their broader context and bent to fit a dominant narrative. As ancient Greek philosopher Solon once said, “A half truth is the worst of all lies because it can be defended in partiality.” ....
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Yes.... but its effect is so small that it's essentially inconsequential to the climate. The first few parts per million helped warm the Earth (a tiny bit) in the early days of our planet's 4.5-billion-year history. But as is so often the case wherever the "Law of Diminishing Returns" comes into play, after the initial bump produced by the first few ppm, the ability to absorb additional infrared radiation from the Sun drops off so fast as to be meaningless... The first oceans formed on our planet around 3.8 billion years ago. Ever since then, vast quantities of water are continually evaporating from the oceans to accumulate in our atmosphere as water vapour. And that water vapour absorbs the same wavelengths of infrared radiation as CO2 does. Thanks to that overlap in wavelengths, the greenhouse effect from CO2 is utterly irrelevant as long as there's water vapour in the atmosphere....
A great example to illustrate the importance of water vapour even as it exposes the irrelevance of CO2 comes from comparing the climate in humid Florida to that of the dry Sahara Desert, which are at roughly the same latitude and which both have the same amount of CO2 in the air. On those hot, humid summer nights in Florida, sweltering nighttime temperatures barely dip as water vapour traps heat that has built up over the course of the day. Meanwhile, with very little moisture in the air above the dry Sahara to insulate the ground from the baking Sun, daytime temperatures soar far above the hottest temperatures seen in Florida during the daytime, only to immediately plunge to well below freezing as soon as the Sun goes down. Without enough water vapour in the air, the ground is exposed to the full force of the Sun during the daytime and then, as night falls, the day's accumulated heat quickly escapes back out into space without water vapour to trap that heat. Water vapour matters. CO2 does not....
The idea that "carbon dioxide is the control knob on the climate" is a colossal public deception. In reality, what drives climate on both short- and long-term timeframes is a dizzyingly complex and dynamic mix of forces: solar cycles, ocean currents, water vapour, wobbles in our planet's orbit, cyclical changes in cloud cover, continental drift, cosmic radiation, and so on, all of which are covered in detail in my new book as I piece together the fascinating puzzle that shapes our ever-changing climate. Carbon dioxide is all but irrelevant within that dynamic mix. However, what sets carbon dioxide apart is that, unlike all these other forces, shining a big spotlight on CO2 made it politically useful.
After the oil crisis of the 1970s, followed by the coal miners' strikes in Britain in the 1980s, politicians (beginning with Margaret Thatcher) began pouring vast amounts of public funds into climate research (with a specific focus on highlighting the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide) as a deliberate strategy to push society away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear power — the primary goal of this push was to break the dependency on colluding Middle Eastern oil suppliers and on socialist-sympathizing labour unions in the British coal mining industry. What began as a convenient narrative to shepherd society towards one deceptive political purpose has since mutated into something else altogether as countless others have found new ways to adapt that narrative to suit their own agendas... and to profit from it both politically and financially. Just because an idea isn't true doesn't mean it isn't useful to a lot of people. Nor does it necessarily mean that Thatcher and her peers knew they were promoting baloney — it is all too human to glom onto and champion any idea that confirms our biases if those ideas seem to take us towards our goals....
Is there a link between CO2 and temperature? Again, yes. But in that relationship, temperature is the horse while CO2 is the cart. The cart does not control the direction of the horse. CO2 dissolves in water, but its solubility decreases as water temperature increases.... What this means is that as oceans warm up after an ice age, they necessarily begin to degas CO2 in the same way that CO2 bubbles out of a soda as the soda warms up. Likewise, as global temperatures cool, the oceans cool in lockstep and begin to absorb CO2 back out of the atmosphere. CO2 follows temperature — basic chemistry makes it impossible to be the other way round....
Thanks to this relationship between CO2 solubility and water temperature, we can see over the past few million years that atmospheric CO2 decreases to around 180 ppm during ice ages, and then rises back up to around 280 ppm as oceans warm up during warm interglacial periods. CO2 lags temperature by around 800 years because it takes that long for deeper levels of the ocean to warm up after the climate warms. Warming or cooling that much "soda" takes time....
Is human activity changing our climate? Again, yes, but not in the way that it is popularly portrayed — those changes have nothing to do with fossil fuel emissions but have everything to do with how our activities are impacting local water cycles.
Two of the most important ways in which humans change their local climates are through:
Deforestation: As forests are cut down, rainfall decreases, which causes local climates to get drier. The most obvious example of this phenomenon is the well-known story of what happens to the local climate after the Amazonian rainforest is cleared to make way for soybean plantations, but the drying of local climates happens everywhere that forests are cut down.
For example, contrary to Al Gore's claims, Mt. Kilimanjaro's glaciers are not shrinking because the global climate has gotten warmer, but because the local climate got drier as locals deforested the perimeter of the mountain. Without lush forests to shield the soil and pump water vapour into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration, the region got drier, less rain and snow fell on the mountain, and the increasingly dry air increased sublimation rates as the dry air turned ice on the mountain back into water vapour. And, to make matters worse, as the air got drier, there was less water vapour in the air to shield the icy mountaintop from the full intensity of the Sun, just like in my earlier example from the Sahara.
Once again, the important part of the story is not temperature, it's aridity — water vapour. All around the world, there is a direct link between deforestation, aridification, and desertification. By destroying at least one third of the planet's historic forests over the past few centuries, we have completely reshaped countless local climates.
Soil erosion and humus losses: Sod protects soil from evaporation. And carbon (humus) in the soil acts like a sponge to capture and absorb moisture during a rainfall. Thus, any human activity that strips soil of its vegetative cover and erodes and/or oxidizes carbon in the soil will cause soil to get drier and the plants growing on it to become more vulnerable to water shortages. In other words, soil erosion makes the local climate more vulnerable to drought even if rainfall stays the same.
All over the world, our impact on the land is fueling colossal rates of soil erosion, which lead directly to desertification. According to UN estimates, we are losing around 24 billion tons of fertile cropland soil to erosion every year. Over 1.5 billion hectares of formerly productive land have already been lost to desertification... and that number is growing by an additional 12 million hectares per year! But contrary to popular claims, this desertification is not caused by CO2 — it's purely the result of how we are (mis)managing the land, which is causing the land to dry out.
As for those 1.2 billion climate refugees that the United Nations predicts will be migrating north to escape a warming climate by 2050... although many really are fleeing rapidly deteriorating local climates, in reality they are fleeing desertification caused by local deforestation and local soil erosion, not changes to the global climate. But would borders be flung wide open to receive them if it was widely recognized that they were fleeing local land management problems instead of the alleged consequences of CO2 belching out of SUVs in rich countries?...
By blaming CO2, we are ensuring that the true underlying causes of this slow-rolling ecological collapse are completely misunderstood. By consequence, the solutions imposed by both governments and local land managers are destined to be completely ineffective at fixing the problems (or even make the problems worse) because they fail to address the root causes.
Not only is "green colonialism" undermining the ability of developing countries to solve their own problems as Western institutions dictate to poor countries how they should (and shouldn't) develop their economies, but the CO2-obsessed bureaucratic institutions of the neo-liberal West are also busily demonizing and even banning all of the most important yet deeply misunderstood tools that land managers all over the world have at their disposal to reverse the processes of soil erosion and desertification — such as grazing livestock, low-intensity controlled wildfires, and a host of other strategies that are essential to create and sustain fertile drought-resistant soils...
Anyone familiar with the geologic record is well aware that past climates follow a simple rule of thumb: hot and humid, cold and dry. But why? Intuitively we think that deserts should expand as it gets hotter, but the opposite is true. Why do deserts expand whenever the climate cools, while rainforests and lush vegetation expand whenever the global climate warms?
The simple explanation for this paradox is that more than 70% of the planet's surface is covered by water. Evaporation increases over the oceans as the planet warms, which increases global humidity levels, which in turn increases rainfall over land as trade winds push that extra moisture over the continents. Peer-reviewed research referenced in my book has shown that a mere "10% increase in humidity levels increases rainfall by two to three times."
And so, paradoxically, despite the fact that temperatures and thus global humidity and rainfall are increasing, deforestation and soil erosion are nevertheless causing many local regions to suffer from drought, falling stream levels, and declining aquifers. Our destructive impact on our local ecosystems has damaged the moisture absorbing capabilities of our soils, increased runoff rates as the extra rainfall washes away as floods instead of absorbing into the soil, and increased soil evaporation rates by removing the sod and vegetative cover that once shielded the soil from the Sun.
Even here in British Columbia, there's a direct link, described in detail in the book, between soil mismanagement, drought-stressed trees, pine beetle infestations, and the dangerous high-intensity wildfires that have plagued so many communities in Western Canada in recent years. The underlying causes have nothing to do with CO2 or global warming but have everything to do with how we are mismanaging our fields, grasslands, and forests. In effect, we are manufacturing drought (and suffering its consequences) despite an overall trend of increasing precipitation.....
We have been fortunate over the past century to enjoy one of the most favourable climatic periods in history. But the past century is not the norm. The droughts of the last century have been nothingburgers compared to the vicious droughts that routinely happened during the long dry phases of our ever-changing cyclical climate.
If the soil erosion we have caused over the past century has been so severe that it is causing streams and aquifers to decline during periods of increasing rainfall, imagine what will happen when the climate really does turn drier during the next dry cycle?...
Megadroughts are not existential threats to ecosystems as long as soils are healthy. Plant growth decreases and animal populations shrink as rainfall levels decline, but the geological record clearly shows that these megadroughts did not trigger full-scale ecosystem collapses before humans came along because the plants and animals in these arid regions evolved strategies to cope with these natural long-term climate cycles. Cyclical climate variations only become an existential threat to an ecosystem when you remove the sod, erode the soils, remove the animals that formerly kept the sod and soil healthy, and exhaust the carbon (humus) in the soil, thus robbing the ecosystem of all its natural defences to withstand these long-duration cyclical changes in temperature and rainfall.
Decades of deforestation and/or soil erosion have made our local ecosystems increasingly brittle, yet that increased brittleness remains invisible during periods of abundant rainfall. The increased brittleness is only exposed when the next dry phase of the cyclical climate begins, and the ecosystem suddenly and catastrophically begins to fall apart.
For example, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, settlers busted the sod of the Great Plains with their plows. Everything was fine and everyone enjoyed bountiful crops until the 1930s when the climate shifted towards a natural dry phase caused by cyclical changes in ocean currents off the Pacific Coast (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which runs on a 50-year cycle — 20 to 30 wet years followed by 20 to 30 dry years). The denuded soils, stripped of their protective sod and depleted by decades of intensive cultivation, were left utterly defenseless against the dry conditions, and so the entire Great Plains ecosystem suddenly collapsed in the greatest man-made ecological disaster in North American history. Entire soil horizons were carried away as dry winds swept across the plains from the West even as plagues of locusts and jackrabbits consumed any specs of greenery that hadn't already been turned to dust by the dry winds....
While deforestation, soil erosion, and desertification are all bad news stories, rising CO2 is beneficial to plants as an essential fertilizer element — many commercial greenhouses even pump CO2 into their greenhouses to raise CO2 to more than double current atmospheric CO2 levels in order to boost plant growth. Rising atmospheric CO2 also helps plants conserve moisture because they don't have to open their pores as widely to absorb the CO2 they need from the atmosphere.
But does all this mean that rising CO2 is a good news story can be disregarded — a fortunate beneficial side-effect of our use of fossil fuels? Once again, there’s so much more to the story. While increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere are undeniably beneficial to plants, once you understand the real reasons why atmospheric CO2 is rising, it soon becomes apparent that it's not a good news story at all.
The "consensus narrative" alleges that most (78%) of CO2 comes from fossil fuel emissions. But the economic slowdown caused by Covid lockdowns punched a giant hole in that narrative. As NASA reported in 2021, "the most surprising result is that while carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 5.4% in 2020, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continued to grow at about the same rate as in preceding years." This isn't what should have happened in a straightforward case of cause-and-effect. Whenever there's a loose thread in a story that everyone assumes to be an undeniable fact, you have to test your assumptions by giving that loose thread a good pull to see what falls out.
A further controversy erupted in 2022 when a study by Skrable et al. looked at carbon isotopes in the atmosphere (C-12 vs C-14) to try to directly measure (rather than assuming) what proportion of the atmospheric gas mix comes from fossil fuels. Their results were nothing less than heresy — if the authors of the study had lived in the year 1600, they most assuredly would have been burned at the stake along with Giordano Bruno for his then-heretical claim that the Earth orbits the Sun. Skrable et al found that only 12% of the CO2 in our current atmosphere can be traced to fossil fuel emissions.
12%, not 78%!
But is that a plausible finding? If not from fossil fuel emissions, then where does it come from and why is CO2 building up in our atmosphere instead of topping out at around 280 ppm like it did during previous warm interglacial periods?
As you'll discover when you dive into my new book, pulling on these loose threads led me to stumble across the most important scientific and political detective story of our century. What emerged as the many pieces of this story came together is a complex tale about soil, about global biomass, about land management, about ecological crises, and ultimately about the perverse incentives created by central planning, which not only hollow out civilization but also the ecosystems upon which civilization is built.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” ― John Muir
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