[ Frequently Asked Questions > Why Is  Global Warming Occurring? Is There a Common-Sense Solution? ]

Why Is  Global Warming Occurring? Is There a Common-Sense Solution?

Global warming—an emotionally charged economic, political, and ecological issue, is extremely serious. Unfortunately, many who speak the loudest on either side of the controversy do not understand all the physical processes that drive global warming. Therefore, they will not have an environmentally safe solution to the problem. You can identify those individuals by asking them a simple question: “What atomic characteristic makes a gas a greenhouse gas?” ¹

We frequently hear that humans are raising global temperatures by producing too much carbon dioxide (CO₂), a greenhouse gas. That is only part of the problem.² Other factors are involved. Increases in atmospheric CO₂ began recently—at the start of the industrial revolution (in about 1750), but global warming started thousands of years earlier—at the end of the ice age. Therefore, man-made CO₂ is not the only cause of global warming. Surprisingly, water vapor in the atmosphere is a more potent and abundant greenhouse gas than CO₂. The amount of water vapor, its warming effect, and the ability of the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, all increase as temperatures rise. This then produces more water vapor, more warming, more water vapor, etc., ad infinitum. This is the first of six positive feedback cycles. Each, by itself, contributes to global warming, but the combination of all six acting simultaneously is an alarming problem that few understand, making global warming almost unstoppable—but not quite. Soon you will see five other positive feedback cycles.

If not reversed, global warming will damage world economies, raise sea level,³ and produce extreme weather (tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, and local floods). Poorer countries will suffer the most. Refugees will increasingly flee across international borders. Thousands of researchers with conflicting and often dangerous solutions to the problem are competing for funds.

However, before we spend trillions of dollars trying to stop global warming, all its causes should be clearly understood.

Earth’s temperature fluctuates. Still, the dangerous warming trend, seen over centuries, may continue, because all six cycles are operating simultaneously and feeding off of each other.

To understand the second positive feedback cycle, we must understand why the Earth has so much ice—7 million cubic miles, of which 88% is in Antarctica and 10% in Greenland. If all that ice melts, sea level will rise at least 200 feet with disastrous results.³. Just a 10-meter (33-foot) rise in sea level would displace 10% of the world’s population and submerge New Orleans, New York City, London, much of Florida, and small islands. Large parts of North America’s east coast, northern Europe, Bangladesh, Siberia, and China, would also be flooded. A 200-foot rise in sea level would displace 20% of the world’s population.⁴

The global flood produced the unique conditions that for over a century caused the Ice Age: cold continents and warm oceans. [See pages 111– 157.] Crashing hydroplates at the end of the flood crushed and thickened continents and buckled up Earth’s major mountains, making continents temporarily higher and, consequently, colder than they are today. Also, after the flood, oceans were warmer than today, primarily because so much magma erupted onto the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Even today, extremely hot supercritical water, jetting up from under the ocean floor, is warming the oceans. [See Figure 56 on page 125.] Warm oceans produced extensive evaporation and precipitation, which on the high, cold continents resulted in extreme snowfall rates that built up glaciers. Heavy cloud cover, dust, and light-reflecting aerosols from volcanoes, also a consequence of the flood, further cooled the continents.

Large temperature differences between cold continents and warm oceans generated powerful wind systems that quickly carried moist air up and over continents where the water cooled, condensed, and fell as snow. Each winter’s glacial advances were followed by summer’s glacial retreats. These yearly cycles left marks that some mistakenly believe show multiple ice ages (4–30 ice ages, depending on location).

For a few centuries after the flood, oceans gradually cooled and the continents and their mountains, that thickened during the compression event, slowly sank into the mantle. Both changes steadily reduced the heavy snowfall toward today’s rates. Eventually, ice depths peaked. With decreasing snow cover, less of the Sun’s radiation was reflected off ice sheets and back into space.⁵ Therefore, the Sun has been increasingly warming the Earth and melting ice—a second positive feedback cycle that will continue unless governments take steps to reverse as many of the positive feedback cycles as possible.

Another consequence of Earth’s ice melting is rising sea levels, which shift mass toward the equator, slightly increasing Earth’s polar moment of inertia and slowing Earth’s spin rate, so days and nights are increasing slightly in length.⁶ (This is one reason clocks on Earth are stopped periodically for one second to let the slowing Earth catch up.) Therefore, the longer days become slightly warmer, and the longer nights are slightly colder. The net effect of all this is more melting ice and global warming—a third positive feedback cycle.

Those who claim that man is the sole cause of global warming have not addressed the critical question: Why did the Earth once have so much ice? Apart from the worldwide flood, explanations for the Ice Age have fatal scientific problems—something most Earth scientists understand. Since the peak of the Ice Age, melting ice has raised sea level about 400 feet;⁷ man did not cause that rise. Without major changes, sea level will rise at least 10 inches in the next 100 years and almost 200 feet in the next few thousand years.⁸ This rise will soon be apparent to all.

Yes, atmospheric CO₂ is increasing, but much of the increase is due to warming oceans, which then release some of their vast amounts of dissolved CO₂. That, in turn, increases warming—a fourth positive feedback cycle. (Oceans contain 50 times more CO₂ than the atmosphere!) Simply stated, CO₂ increases warm the oceans, which then release more of their dissolved CO₂ warming the atmosphere and oceans even more.

Forest fires produce CO₂ directly and heat the atmosphere, which then makes forest fires more likely—a fifth positive feedback cycle. As the Earth warms, the decay of organic material within the soil increases, and releases more CO₂ —a sixth positive feedback cycle.

What Can Be Done? If the Earth can begin to cool, all six positive feedback cycles and global warming will reverse. Some are proposing geoengineering: massive, deliberate interventions in Earth's natural systems to counteract global warming. Those schemes would probably pollute the biosphere and risk other unintended consequences.

Before the flood, there were no major ice sheets, so losing glaciers is not the problem. Earth’s preflood vegetation was lush, as evidenced by today’s abundant coal, oil, and methane deposits. But even without major ice sheets to cool the preflood earth, that lush vegetation compensated and made Earth the comfortable habitat God intended. We can move toward those conditions safely by merely reestablishing and conserving, to the extent possible, Earth’s forests.⁹ Within a few decades, reforestation and reducing deforestation would sequester considerable carbon rather than letting it overheat the Earth. Cooling oceans would no longer rise or release their dissolved CO₂. ¹⁰ Annual damage from storms will steadily decrease from the current few hundred billion dollars each year.

Currently, we are losing 25 million acres of forests a year, but plenty of fertile land is available for planting new forests.¹¹ Yes, conserving forests and reforestation will be expensive, but far less than the billions of dollars of storm damage each year—not to mention the loss of lives in storms, fires, and hurricanes. Just in n 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused $265billion in damage.¹² Suicide rates also increase with increases in temperature.¹³

China, recognizing that reforestation is a simple and safe way to address global warming, “sows seedlings [each year] over an area the size of Ireland”—a total of billions of trees over each of the past four decades.¹⁴ Likewise, Canada is “planting 2 billion trees—200 million a year on top of the 600 million currently planted annually,¹⁵and New Zealand has planted 140 million trees.¹⁶

Photosynthesis. In summary, the solution to global warming is photosynthesis, which uses the Sun’s energy to split water into useful hydrogen and oxygen rather than letting that solar energy heat the Earth. Today, photosynthesis on Earth absorbs three times the energy generated by human activity.¹⁸

So, by increasing photosynthesis on Earth by one-third, more of the Sun’s energy will be absorbed by plants as is produced by all human activity. Global warming will end, and the six harmful positive feedback cycles mentioned above will reverse: glaciers will stabilize, oceans will stop rising, our atmosphere’s main greenhouse gases (CO₂ and water vapor) will steadily decline, forest fires costing billions of dollars each year and producing a tragic loss of life will diminish, and decay processes within soil will slow. We must begin immediately.

Those who express opinions on the cause of global warming usually look at its effects today and assume its cause—without considering preflood conditions, because they have no idea there was a global flood.

The hydroplate explanation, which accounts for many other features of the Earth and solar system, provides a more comprehensive understanding of global warming, not only from effect back to cause but also from cause directly to effect. We can have greater confidence in our conclusion when, after considering all the data, including the Ice Age and its causes, the issue is seen identically in both directions: cause-to-effect and effect-to-cause. 

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