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Some other views on global warming By Michael C. Guilmette Jr. Originally published on March 19, 2009, in the Connersville News-Examiner. Tomorrow, March 20, marks the first day of spring for 2009, and with it comes milder temperatures, greening grass, songbirds and a release from one of the coldest winters in recent memory. Spring will progress through the coming months, assuming Mother Nature doesn’t surprise us with a late snowfall, and eventually, we will get into global warming — you know, the season we used to call ‘summer.’
Former Vice President Al Gore, the Nobel (ahem) laureate, presidential pretender and global warming’s leading door-to-door salesman promotes the popular view of this invisible crisis: It’s happening; it’s happening faster than we realize; and it’s happening because of humans — particularly because of overweight Republicans who shop at Wal-Mart and drive SUVs. Gore and his supporters regularly say the time for debate is over because the “consensus “of climate scientists is that global warming is a reality. Of course, having a consensus in science is like saying 2 plus 2 equals 5 because a majority of scientists agree on it, but we won’t dwell on that right now. Indeed, we from the northern climes have experienced some milder winters in the last few years — if you consider 20 below zero as being milder than 30 below and three feet of snow as opposed to five feet. Granted, I grew up north of the 45th parallel next to the largest snow-generating lake in the country, so mild is open to interpretation. What is also open to interpretation is the views on global warming, its causes and its effects (or lack thereof). Here are a few of them I have chosen to highlight: • Global warming, or more accurately climate change, is cyclical and natural. This is the most common view of global warming skeptics. On Nov. 29, 1996, Science magazine reported findings of sea surface temperature studies that showed temperatures in the Sargasso Sea 1,000 years ago were roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer than today but were roughly 1 degree Celsius cooler 1,700 years ago as well as 400 years ago. This timeframe coincides with the Medieval Warm Period (AD 800 to 1300) and the Little Ice Age, a roughly 500-year period of cooling that ended in the mid 1800s. These findings and others led geologist Gerard Bond to postulate that the northern hemisphere experiences cooling cycles every 1,500 years. Bond, who worked at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., and died in 2005, surmised that variations in solar activity are the cause of the cooling. This leads me to my next point: • Global warming is more accurately solar warming, caused solely by the sun. The alternative band They Might Be Giants said, “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas” in their 1993 song, “Why Does the Sun Shine?” Correct as they might be, they understated the truth just a tad. The sun consumes immense amounts of nuclear fuel and produces more energy every second than humanity has used in its entire history. The sun, in fact, is so massive that even minor solar fluctuations can cause major changes on Earth — and elsewhere in the solar system. The U.K. Times Online reported on April 29, 2007, that climate change is not just an Earth phenomenon, it is happening on Mars as well. The Times said NASA scientists have reported that the dead red planet has warmed by half a degree Celsius since the 1970s — when we started sending surface probes. While a few man-made global warming fanatics may try to tie this warming to what could be dubiously called human activity — our fleet of scientific probes — the truth is we can no more affect the Martian climate than we can affect our own climate. Space.com reported on Dec. 6, 2001, that Martian polar caps, suspected of being a combination of water ice and dry ice, have been gradually receding. More recently, ScienceDaily reported on May 23 of last year that Jupiter, the largest in our planetary family, has been experiencing an uptick in turbulence and storm activity in its massive atmosphere. These roughly concurrent events point to a single common cause — the sun. The sun is hot, but that too changes. The sun ebbs every 11 years, producing sunspots that are indicators of its level of activity. Current observations show the sun may be cutting back its activity. NASA said on May 10, 2006, that Solar Cycle 25, predicted to peak in 2022, could be the weakest in centuries. The last time solar activity drop to what NASA scientists believe may happen, the northern hemisphere was locked in the coldest time of the Little Ice Age. In fact, a few brave scientists are saying we are actually on the cusp of a new ice age. • If global warming is happening, we aren’t doing the right things. Presently, our efforts are geared towards measures of mitigating global warming in an attempt to prevent it from happening. These efforts are broad ranging, including President Barack Obama’s proposed $2 trillion cap-and-trade system, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, higher vehicle efficiency and emission standards all the way down to households using compact fluorescent light bulbs. While almost every nation has signed on to Kyoto, which requires industrial countries to cut back on alleged greenhouse gas emissions, the Bush administration rightly rejected the suicide pact because it exempted half the world’s population — namely China and India, currently among the world’s worst polluters. Kyoto had a feel-good quality about it because it meant the world was saying in a single voice that we would try to prevent global warming, but it does nothing to address the possibility that global warming could be happening through no fault of humanity, and there is nothing we could do to stop it. In that case, we should instead be looking at ways to survive and even thrive if the planet does warm up a little more than we have been accustomed to these last few decades. Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing milder winters, but that’s just me. • Guilmette is managing editor of the News-Examiner. He may be contacted at mguilmette@newsexaminer.com. |
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Copyright © 2009, Michael C. Guilmette Jr. |
As the temperature of the planet rises — well, the northern hemisphere, that is — we are sure to hear a renewed series of alarmist reports about how global warming will destroy the planet unless we make drastic changes now, and from the usual suspects.
