The Carbon Dioxide Fear

[travelinman]

The Carbon Dioxide Fear
January 5th, 2006

A new report in the prestigious British journal Nature shows how greenhouse gasses (normally associated with global warming) are now slated to cause global freezing as well. This has led me to throw in the towel and admit, as liberals have been arguing for the past 25 years, that CO2 really is the main problem confronting humanity. As Al Gore succinctly summed it up, ?global warming is more serious than terrorism.? After all, it causes so many calamitous things (whereas terrorism only kills people)?

John Roach reporting for National Geographic News reports that the world?s surface temperature has warmed 1?F (0.6?C) in the last 100 years. This is a calamity in and of itself to be sure. The Nature report adds to this tragedy that in addition to warming, greenhouse gasses will cause the earth to cool at the same time ? quite a trick. But this is just the beginning of the horrors of greenhouse gasses. Let us take a quick look spanning the globe:

From Colorado, through National Geographic News we learn with remorse that swallows, are showing up to their U.S. breeding grounds about 12 days earlier than they were 30 years ago, according to Hector Galbraith at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Galbraith calls the results ?worrying.?

Miles away In the North Sea greenhouse gasses are busy destroying cold-water plankton and replacing them with ? gasp ?warm water plankton. But the National Geographic News shows us that this is only the beginning. The loss of specifically cold-water plankton causes decreases in the number of sand eels which causes many species of seabirds to fail to breed (out of empathy with the sand eels perhaps). The world is definitely falling apart.

But it gets more ominous still because the greenhouse gasses are not done. AOL News reports that in northern Russia, frogs have been spotted more often on the tundra and some birds are not even bothering to migrate. Simultaneously over in the North Pole CO2 is causing polar ice to contract to its smallest size in at least a century. But the situation is much graver still.

AOL News takes us to Norway where we learn that reindeer traditionally herded by Sami people?who evidently are a type of people who live in Norway?were vulnerable when winter snows did not fall as much as usual. The article quotes a Sami environmental activist named Prakhova as saying, ?Snow is cold for us but for reindeer it is a soft winter bed.? She goes on, ?Lack of snow also makes it hard for reindeer to feed on lichen because the plants can get covered by sharp ice, which cuts their soft muzzles.?

As an American I am embarrassed that my country sent 100,000 troops overseas to defend freedom in Iraq while ignoring the dangers of greenhouse gasses as they kill cold-water plankton, injure reindeer noses, and spread frogs across the great Russian tundra. The temperature right now in Fairfax, Va (from where I write) is 41?F. If we had concentrated our focus instead of Iraq on the CO2 terror it would be 40?F.

Interestingly, as it now turns out greenhouse gasses will cause cooling by the same mechanism as proposed in the movie hit of a summer ago, The Day After Tomorrow ? a disruption in the conveyor-belt current that brings warm air northward. At the time environmental activists and intellectual elitists, demonstrating their neutrality, acknowledged that even their best computer models found it unlikely for disruptions in the conveyor-belt currents to cause thousand foot tidal waves to crash into Manhattan, instantly freeze, and cause the entire population of the northeast to move to Mexico. But their models do now predict disruptions of cold-water plankton populations. Which is I suppose, the perfect thing for big hearted liberals to worry about while the rest of us go about the business of fighting terrorism, spreading freedom, and making this planet safe for our children.

Jason Katz Cooper is a biologist in Northern Virginia.


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[travelinman]

Ian Plimer: Global warming a damp squib

January 05, 2006
HEAT, bushfires. Just another Australian summer, some hotter, some wetter, some cooler, some drier. As per usual, the northern hemisphere freezes and the blame game is in overdrive. At the 2005 UN Climate Change Conference in Montreal, Greenpeace's Steven Guilbeault stated: "Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with."

It is that simple! If it's hot, it's global warming; if it's cold, it's global warming. Demonstrators in frigid temperatures in Montreal chanted: "It's hot in here! There's too much carbon in the atmosphere!" The same apocalyptic Guilbeault says: "Time is running out to deal with climate change. Ten years ago, we thought we had a lot of time, five years ago we thought we had a lot of time, but now science is telling us that we don't have a lot of time." Really.

In 1992, Greenpeace's Henry Kendall gave us the Chicken Little quote, "Time is running out"; in 1994, The Irish Times tried to frighten the leprechauns with "Time running out for action on global warming, Greenpeace claims"; and in 1997 Chris Rose of Greenpeace maintained the religious mantra with "Time is running out for the climate". We've heard such failed catastrophist predictions before. The Club of Rome on resources, Paul Erlich on population, Y2K, and now Greenpeace on global warming.

During the past 30 years, the US economy grew by 50 per cent, car numbers grew by 143 per cent, energy consumption grew by 45 per cent and air pollutants declined by 29 per cent, toxic emissions by 48.5 per cent, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3 per cent and airborne lead by 97.3 per cent. Most European signatories to the Kyoto Protocol had greenhouse gas emissions increase since 2001, whereas in the US emissions fell by nearly 1per cent. Furthermore, carbon credits rewarded Russia, (east) Germany and Britain, which had technically and economically backward energy production in 1990.

By the end of this century, the demographically doomed French, Italians and Spaniards may have too few environmentalists to fund Greenpeace's business. So what really does Greenpeace want? A habitable environment with no humans left to inhabit it? Destruction of the major economies for .07C change?

Does it matter if sea level rises a few metres or global temperatures rise a few degrees? No. Sea level changes by up to 400m, atmospheric temperatures by about 20C, carbon dioxide can vary from 20 per cent to 0.03 per cent, and our dynamic planet just keeps evolving. Greenpeace, contrary to scientific data, implies a static planet. Even if the sea level rises by metres, it is probably cheaper to address this change than reconstruct the world's economies.

For about 80 per cent of the time since its formation, Earth has been a warm, wet, greenhouse planet with no icecaps. When Earth had icecaps, the climate was far more variable, disease depopulated human settlements and extinction rates of other complex organisms were higher. Thriving of life and economic strength occurs during warm times. Could Greenpeace please explain why there was a pre-Industrial Revolution global warming from AD900 to 1300? Why was the sea level higher 6000 years ago than it is at present? Which part of the 120m sea-level rise over the past 15,000 years is human-induced? To attribute a multicomponent, variable natural process such as climate change to human-induced carbon emissions is pseudo-science.

There is no debate about climate change, only dogma and misinformation. For example, is there a link between hurricanes Katrina and Rita and global warming? Two hurricanes hit the US Gulf Coast six weeks apart in 1915, mimicking Katrina and Rita. If global warming caused recent storms, there should have been more hurricanes in the Pacific and Indian oceans since 1995. Instead, there has been a slight decrease at a time when China and India have increased greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of hurricanes might seem more severe because of the blanket instantaneous news coverage and because more people now live in hurricane-prone areas, hence there is more property damage and loss of life.

Only a strong economy can produce the well fed who have the luxury of espousing with religious fervour their uncosted, impractical, impoverishing policies. By such policies, Greenpeace continues to exacerbate grinding poverty in the Third World. The planet's best friend is human resourcefulness with a supportive, strong economy and reduced release of toxins. The greenhouse gases - nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane - have been recycled for billions of years without the intervention of human politics.

Ian Plimer is a professor of geology at the University of Adelaide and former head of the school of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne.

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<font color="#FFFFAA" size="1">[ January 05, 2006 04:37 PM: Message edited by: travelinman ]</font>