Celestial climate driver: a perspective from four billion years of the carbon cycle

Geoscience Canada, March, 2005 by Jan Veizer

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In my four decades of research into the evolution of the Earth, always with strong environmental connotations, I was almost exclusively financed by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). In the last decade, particularly relevant to this article, the research was supported by two major sources, the top research award of the DFG (Leibniz Prize endowed with 3 million DM) and the support of the Research Chair in "Earth System" financed jointly by NSERC and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR). The donors to CIAR include Noranda and Dr. G.G. Hatch, with the sponsorship based on an arms' length relationship via CIAR and NSERC.

Personally, this last decade has been a trying period because of the years of internal struggle between what I wanted to believe and where the empirical record and its logic were leading me. This article is clearly not a comprehensive review of the alternatives, partly because of space limitations, but also because the case for the alternatives was eloquently argued elsewhere (e.g., IPCC, 2001). It is rather a plea for some reflection in our clamour for over-simplified beliefs and solutions in the face of the climate conundrum. Due to space considerations, the article also does not explore the potential role that the lethal CRF may have played in the evolution of life, as a cause of extinctions and/or mutations. And above all, this article is not a discussion of Kyoto, a treaty with social, economic and political aims, but a scientific treatise of the past climate record. Time will rule on its validity, but in the meantime I ask that the discussion of its merits/demerits be confined to scientific ways and means.

As a final point, I am indebted to several experts worldwide, covering the whole gamut of fields from astrophysics to biology and modeling, who agreed to read the manuscript in order to make sure that its statements are scientifically defensible. The journal reviewers, Brendan Murphy and Alan Hildebrand, helped to set the tone of the presentation.

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