NOXTAK® Technologies

EMF Climate Change

Abstract:

During these years, many events, such as the Covid-19, have shaken our ways of living; but we seem to have forgotten about a threat that has not gone away: global warming. Human activities are still increasing pollution as we speak, and we are not doing much to change that, so natural temperatures are driving up, causing several effects in our environment as we know it.

Recently, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was yet another warning, a ‘code red’ indicating the urgency and need for action. The report outlined the impact humans have had on the earth so far and the nature of extreme weather events in the upcoming decades if no significant changes are made to mitigate our carbon footprint.

Believe it or not, technology and telecoms might be a big part of the many ever-growing factors contributing to Climate Change. Cities have increased the background levels of microwave radiation by 1,000,000% in the last 30 years. With around 6 million 4G telecom towers already operating worldwide, a few million 5G antennas being gradually deployed, and more satellites transmitting microwave signals to earth, have we thought about the impact electromagnetic radiation might have on our planet?

In my experience conducting environmental assessments around EMF, I’m impressed with how this “soft” radiation in terms of frequencies -at least enough to be classified as Non-Ionizing radiation- can produce that much harm in biological species, mainly because of its artificial polarization at the fundamental level. 

And it’s for that reason that I can’t, as a scientist, reject the idea to consider looking in some directions that others in the past have automatically dismissed and labeled as an unacceptable factor in global warming. 

History has shown us how so-called experts often miss variables in front of their eyes because of prejudices and beliefs that work as dogmas in their minds. So, if we want to solve the climate crisis or, at least, be prepared for the coming decades, we need to consider all the variables implied. 

Our planet is an open giant biological system, and everything is connected in terms of ecological balance. 

         The climate on Earth has been changing since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. Until recently, natural factors have been the cause of these changes, like volcanic eruptions, changes in the orbit of the Earth, and shifts in the Earth’s crust (known as plate tectonics).

Over the past one million years, the Earth has experienced a series of ice ages, including cooler periods (glacials) and warmer periods (interglacials). For the past few thousand years, Earth has been in an interglacial period with a constant temperature. However, since the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, the global temperature has increased at a much faster rate. 

Scientists and environmentalists have been warning people about climate change and its impacts for several decades now. This phenomenon has been growing uncontrollably, and it’s getting out of hand, putting the future of our planet at imminent risk.

There is more than one single factor contributing to Climate Change. There are several reasons behind this phenomenon, all generated by human activities and all different types of pollutants mixing up to create a chaotic result.

Incredibly, as different recent studies state, EMF could be one of the many human-generated factors actively contributing to global climate change. 

This article will analyze these studies in-depth and determine if electrosmog could be one of those environmental pollutants accelerating global warming based on objective scientific evidence. The idea is to start a genuine interest in environmental scientists to look in this direction and consider EMF one of the variables we need to study to find viable solutions. 

Climate Change and its Known Causes

According to NASA, climate change describes a change in the average conditions — such as temperature and rainfall — in a region over a long time. NASA scientists have observed Earth’s surface is warming, and many of the warmest years on record have happened in the past 20 years.

Climate is defined as the usual weather of a place. Different places on earth can have different climates. It can also be different depending on the seasons. A place might be mostly warm and dry in the summer, and the same area may be cool and wet in the winter. 

And then, there’s the Earth’s climate, which is what you get when you combine all the climates around the world. Earth’s climate is constantly changing; there have been times when Earth’s climate has been warmer or cooler than it is now, and these times can last thousands or millions of years.

People who study Earth see that the climate is getting warmer. Earth’s temperature has gone up about one degree Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, and, although this may not seem like much, these tiny changes in Earth’s temperature can have significant effects, and some of them are already happening.

There’s a global scientific consensus on the leading cause of the accelerated climate change: human activity. According to experts, humans cause climate change by releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air. 

Today, there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has ever been in, at least, the past 2 million years. During the 20th and 21st centuries, the level of carbon dioxide rose by 40%.

We produce greenhouse gases in lots of different ways:

  • Power Plants: Forty percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions stem from electricity production. Ninety-three percent of the electric industry emissions result from burning coal. According to the EPA, coal-fired power plants and municipal and medical waste incineration account for two-thirds of U.S. mercury emissions.
  • Transportation: EPA reports state that thirty-three percent of U.S. emissions come from the transportation of people and goods.
  • Farming: Industrial farming and ranching release vast levels of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Agriculture contributes forty percent of the methane and twenty percent of the carbon dioxide to worldwide emissions.
  • Deforestation: Deforestation to use wood for building materials, paper, and fuel increases global warming in two ways: the release of carbon dioxide during the deforestation process and the reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide that forests can capture.
  • Fertilizers: the use of nitrogen-rich fertilizers increases the amount of heat cropland can store. Nitrogen oxides can trap up to 300 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Sixty-two percent of nitrous oxide released comes from agricultural byproducts.
  • Oil Drilling: Burn-off from the oil drilling industry impacts the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel retrieval, processing, and distribution are responsible for roughly eight percent of carbon dioxide and thirty percent of methane pollution.
  • Natural Gas Drilling: Touted as a cleaner fuel source, natural gas drilling causes massive air pollution. The hydraulic fracturing technique used to extract natural gas from shale deposits pollutes groundwater sources as well.
  • Garbage: As trash breaks down in landfills, it releases methane and nitrous oxide gases. Approximately eighteen percent of methane gas in the atmosphere comes from waste disposal and treatment.

What does EMF have to do with climate change?

Just like carbon emissions and other kinds of pollutants, EMF is a human-generated environmental toxin. Electromagnetic radiation is increasing every day, and several studies have demonstrated its many biological effects on human health, animals, plants, and ecosystems. 

But, besides that, is there any reason to believe that Electrosmog could be accelerating global warming? Well, some recent scientific studies around the Earth’s Magnetic Field, Cosmic Rays, and KELEA (kinetic energy limiting electrostatic attraction) suggest that there’s a possibility.

The Earth’s magnetic field and climate connection

A research article published in 2018, called “New perspectives in the study of the Earth’s magnetic field and climate connection: The use of transfer entropy,” suggested that there’s a relation between the earth’s magnetic field and climate change.

But the possible relationship between the Earth’s climate and geomagnetic field has been highly debated in the last fifty years. The first serious proposals that quantify this possible link were given by Wollin, who pointed out that low geomagnetic intensities are generally associated with warm climate periods (similar to the current situation), and by Bucha, who suggested that drifts of geomagnetic poles could have been responsible for displacements of a large low-pressure region of the Earth’s atmosphere associated with an increase of cyclonic activity and sudden climate changes.

Throughout the last few decades, other mechanisms that could explain the geomagnetic field-climate relation have been proposed. For example, some have suggested that the flux of galactic cosmic rays, modulated by the intensity of both the Sun and the Earth’s magnetic fields that act as a protective shield, play an important role in cloud formation and, in this way, the geomagnetic field would be involved in climate processes. 

Others compared the advance and retreat of the Alpine Glaciers during the last three millennia with increases and decreases of the geomagnetic field intensity in Paris estimated from archaeomagnetic data (paleomagnetic data from heated archaeological artefacts). Later work with a complete paleomagnetic intensity database corroborated a similar connection at the European continental scale. The results of these studies suggest a possible link between centennial-scale cooling episodes and enhanced geomagnetic intensity.

In this study, the authors applied for the first time a recent statistical tool, transfer entropy, to shed light on the question of a possible link between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate in order to provide new perspectives in its future analysis. 

“In this work, we have analyzed two real-time series with an analogous evolution for the last 300 years, the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) area extent on the Earth’s surface and the Global Sea Level (GLS) rise. We have analyzed the anomalies of both time series, after removing the long-term trend. The results seem to support the existence of an information flow between SAA and GSL anomalies, with larger information transferred from SAA to GSL and a confidence level of about 90%. The found connection does not mean that the geomagnetic field is fully responsible for the climate changes, rather that it is an important driving component to the variations of the climate. This result is especially relevant because could help to find a physical mechanism able to explain this connection by discarding those in which the climate controls the geomagnetic field and supporting the mechanisms associated with the geomagnetic field.”

Electropollution and KELEA

In 2016, W. John Martin released “KELEA, Cosmic Rays, Cloud Formation, and Electromagnetic Radiation: Electropollution as a Possible Explanation for Climate Change,” a scientific article published in Atmospheric and Climate Sciences on SCIRP. 

In this paper, Martin suggested that human-generated electromagnetic radiation contributed to global warming by diverting an energy force termed KELEA (kinetic energy limiting electrostatic attraction) from its presumed association with cosmic rays. 

“Cosmic ray delivered KELEA is viewed as normally participating in the formation of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). It may do so by transforming electrostatically inert particles into electrostatic aerosols capable of acting as CCN. The resulting clouds act as a reflective barrier to some of the infrared radiation from the sun and, thereby, reduce the earth’s heat. This article proposes that increasing levels of electromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere is reducing the capacity of cosmic rays to deliver adequate KELEA to maintain climate stability through optimal cloud formation.”

Martin also highlighted how KELEA Activated Fluids Could Reduce Carbon Emission by helping agriculture by covering the overall water demand, increasing the life and health of the crops, lowering the use of fertilizers, and cleaning contaminated water. Martin also suggests matching the relative benefits in reducing global warming by providing more cloud cover versus reducing carbon emission. 

About the relation between KELEA and EMF, Martin finally concludes that “It is reasonable to propose that KELEA can be competitively transferred between different sources of available electromagnetic radiation. The worldwide transmission of electromagnetic energies is continuing to increase with technological advances in communications and with more extensive transmissions of electrical power. This has been especially marked in the Northern Hemisphere, which has warmed in excess of the Southern Hemisphere. Some of the KELEA that might normally participate in cloud formation may instead be diverted to the increasing atmospheric levels of mankind-generated electromagnetic radiation. Global warming may, therefore, comprise an added feature of what is commonly called electropollution.”

An Issue with potentially substantial ecological implications

A report released in February 2021 by the US Government, called “The Security Threat that Binds Us: the Unraveling of Ecological and Natural security and what the United States can do About it”, describes our ecological predicament and analyzes the security implications arising from decades of environmental disruption. It takes a deep dive into several pillars of natural security, which span water, food, wildlife, forest, and fisheries systems. Finally, it offers recommendations for how the U.S. and other nations and multilateral institutions can proactively mitigate and address ecological disruption and its impacts on national and human security.

“Global ecological disruption is arguably the 21st Century’s most underappreciated security threat. Human societies are producing rapid, novel, and foundational changes across multiple Earth systems with concomitant—and sometimes severe—consequences for people, societies, and security worldwide. These changes are significant and globally consequential and include the transformation of the atmosphere’s composition, overloaded and depleted soils, toxified and acidified oceans, and reconfigured freshwater systems. Due to human activities, the biosphere—the Earth system that encompasses all living entities—is destabilizing rapidly and fraying the ecological fabric on which human society depends. Many scientists warn that Earth is entering a sixth mass extinction, a period of rapid loss of biodiversity so consequential that it affects the fate of the majority of multicellular organisms on the planet.”

According to the report, since 2009, the Department of Conservation Biology at Cambridge University has hosted an annual gathering of researchers, practitioners, journalists, and other experts to participate in a horizon scan of issues that could have substantial ecological consequences. The chart includes the last five years, and the Potential Effects on Wildlife of Increases in Electromagnetic Radiation were mentioned as an Emerging Global Biological Conservation Issue for 2018. 

My analysis: All possible causes and solutions should be taken into consideration

By better understanding the earth’s magnetic field behavior, cosmic rays, KELEA, and other factors, we will be able to make stronger connections between EMF and the many alterations we see in Earth’s climate. 

Humanity has often assumed that electromagnetic radiation is so tiny that its impacts are negligible. But the scientific evidence collected for a few decades has proven that EMF has real effects and, as it grows, the artificial polarization in its fundamental particles visibly affects the delicate natural balance of our planet. 

I am genuinely convinced that there’s still too much to unravel and understand about the many relations electrosmog has with all kinds of phenomenons we are experiencing nowadays. One of the many clues we have that something is happening with EMF is the alteration of birds’ migration patterns. And there’s also a strong connection between EMF and the Bee Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon that is increasingly worrying experts worldwide.

So, we already know that we have a problem with EMF, it is evident, and more people are slowly becoming aware of this every day. But it’s essential to get to a global scientific, academic, and industrial consensus to dig deeper into this matter, know the size of its actual implications on climate change, and what can we do to control it; just like we are encouraging people to act to stop the other well-known causes of it.

Soon, we are facing exponential growth in EMF pollution related to the evolution of many technologies and industries. For example, there will be an unstoppable increase in electric and hybrid vehicles, IoT will be an everyday thing sooner than later, and hyperconnectivity will be the new normal. Not to mention that this decade will be decisive for the expansion of the space industry, which will definitely increase the radiofrequency emission levels coming from the atmosphere and even the moon.

EMF is an issue that we cannot lose sight of, and I think we must not see it as an isolated problem but instead see the whole picture in an interdisciplinary and interconnected way. There are many questions around this, and, together, we can find answers to preserve the health of our planet.

There’s a lot to study and prove, that’s for sure. But we, as one of the many species threatened by climate change, are not in a position to underestimate a potential threat that we can control. I have always said this and will continue to defend it: Electrosmog can be reduced and even eliminated if we work together on better regulations, better urban planning, and better manufacturing practices. 

By working on these and using filtering technologies like SPIRO®, we can completely control this problem without stopping technological advances and technology use. But we should start studying EMF on a larger scale: in terms of cities, oceans, and, of course, the whole planet as a huge system. 

Joaquín Machado

CEO NOXTAK

EMF specialist and researcher. Advisor on green technologies, IoT, and smart cities.