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Man-Made Global Warming? Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" has been touted by many in the mainstream media as a movie which must be seen and should guide policy in this area. The United States has been roundly condemned by various countries in the West and by the United Nations for refusing to sign the Kyoto protocol on reduction on greenhouse gas emissions. A law suit is currently pending before the Supreme Court of the United States for the purpose of trying to require the Environmental Protection Agency to control the emission of carbon dioxide as an environmentally harmful. As an aside, do you believe your breathing is environmentally harmful to your spouse or children? Each time you exhale, you emit carbon dioxide. Shame on you for breathing. Yet the idea that man has caused and can control global warming does not make sense and in fact has recently been disproved by a scientific discovery concerning Antarctica. Scientists have recently determined that rivulets under the ice cap on Antarctica were caused by global warming 10 to 12 million years ago. That was before man appeared on the earth and long before man started burning fossil fuels, which are supposed to be the cause of our current global warming trend. Steve Milloy, the author of Junk Science (www.junkscience.com), has done several pieces debunking much of the current science on global warming. One of his most recent pieces questioned how we could believe that supposed climate experts could predict catastrophe decades from now when they cannot even properly predict hurricanes four months out. We have had in my short lifetime periods of warmth and cold. When I moved form Ohio to Virginia in the 1960's, there were many days in the middle of Winter when one could go out and play tennis in shorts and a t-shirt. Then in the late 1970's and early 1980's doing so was less likely because the Winters were colder. Indeed about that time people were talking about the coming ice age. Now about slightly over 20 years later people are claiming that there is a catastrophic warming trend caused by man which can and must be controlled by man. If we cannot predict and control hurricanes, how can we control the rest of weather? Indeed, if there was significant warming 10 to 12 million years ago that caused global warming before man was even on this earth, why does our egotism all of a sudden make us think that we are both causing and can control global warming? We also must look at some of the solutions which are being proposed to see if they make sense. Kyoto, for instance, binds only developed countries, essentially the West and Japan. Yet these countries already do much to limit pollution compared to developing countries. Developing countries are not to be controlled under Kyoto. Effectively, Kyoto leaves the worst polluters free to continue doing so. Such really is only a prescription for economic disaster among developed countries. Yet it is the technology of developed countries which has allowed us to develop some means of minimizing pollution. Lest you wonder if in fact Kyoto will destroy developed countries, look at the experience in Europe. The first benchmarks were not met by those European countries which approved Kyoto, and several of the countries said they will never be able to meet the requirements because they would destroy their economies. I talked once to a university professor who admitted that some of the computer models used to predict global warming had serious flaws. He cited the experience of a doctoral student who decided to combine the global warming computer model assumptions with another computer model which allowed for hypothetical development of an area using differing climate information. The student was looking at a 100 year period. In the middle of the period for about a decade, one year the area was a desert, and the next year it was a jungle with the vegetation changing back and forth each year. Thus, unless things have been improved dramatically - which may be questionable given the inability to predict weather a few months out - from what has been used in the past for predicting climate change, we have no real idea what is happening, and whether and, if so, how it can be controlled. Could there be things at work which we do not understand? For instance, could there just be some basic change in the earth which is not necessarily related to climate? Recently there have been warmer Winters in North America and colder Winters in Eastern Europe, mostly Russia. Essentially these areas are on opposite sides of the Earth. Surveyors know that magnetic North shifts slightly and regularly, and they adjust for these movements. Is this just a shift in the magnetic North, or could there be a related shift in the Earth's axis? I have read that, while some of the ice on Greenland is apparently melting, the ice cap on part of Antarctica is thickening. All of this information leads me to believe that we do not have the answers. Yet liberal politicians, such as Olympia Snowe (Olympia Snowe and another Senator recently threatened Exxon Mobile with hearings if the company did not stop funding studies which questioned global warming) and Al Gore, and some of the mainstream media want to stifle debate on the matter. Doing so will only make us dumber. It also plays into the interests of such politicians and the press in controlling our lives and denigrating business. None of this means that we should pollute away. Pollution is harmful, and efforts to keep the environment clean are useful. However, carrying such efforts to absurd ends while stifling reasonable scientific inquiry is counterproductive and ultimately destructive except for the personal reputations and positions of those who preach catastrophic global climate change. |
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