One of the bigger stories in the past decade has been that of Global Warming. As with most any story you read, there are always three sides. The Yes! it’s happening side, the No! It’s not side and as always, muddling around in the middle , the “What’s happening?” crowd.
I’m not really sure where I stand on the issue. There are gadzillions of charts out there, all of them showing a dramatic uptilt on the right side of the chart. As we all learned in school, if the line on your chart goes up on the right side, then generally speaking, something has gained value or increased. Or your chart is upside down.
One problem I see is that the charts all mostly show a slice of time that covers about 100 years. Some of them extrapolate out to 200 years. Certainly, for this time span, the rise in average temperature (of about 1 degree C) is made to seem very dramatic.
Depending on where you read, either Global Warming is a fact, verified by looking out the window and watching the last polar bear on a shrinking piece of ice float by your window, or it is utter fiction, dreamed up by a bunch of bat-in-the-belfry “scientists” hell-bent on running around screaming “the sky is falling.”
The Wall Street Journal article does bring up some very valid points. CO2 is not a pollutant. Every news item I’ve seen for the past few years would make you believe that CO2 is a nasty intruder that is ruining the planet and comes from belching smoke stacks at chemical plants setup next to day-care centers.
If you just remember back to 5th grade general science, you might remember that trees breath CO2 and exhale oxygen. It’s something that most all plants need to live. As long as there’s a fairly healthy balance of CO2 and O2, then everything on the planet that breathes is happy.
One of the things that bothers me most about all these charts that reflect the temperature rise over the past 150 years or so, is that if you take that 150 year span, and put it on a chart that covers the entire 4-billion year history of the earth, will it even show up as a blip?
If I’m not mistaken, haven’t scientists proven that our planet has undergone some pretty wild temperature extremes, all on its own, without any influence from its inhabitants?
It was a relatively recent 21,000 years ago that Rocky Mountains of Colorado were covered by the Fraser glaciers. It was only 10,000 years ago that the Wisconsin Glacial Episode ended, where pretty much everything north of the Ohio river was under hundreds of feet of thick ice. That’s the ice sheet that left all those rocks in New England’s fields that walls are made of now, and left the grooves in New Yorks’s Central park.
We think of these things as one time events that happened in the distant past, and will never happen to the planet again, and certainly not while people are around.
While we are increasing our knowledge of how the universe works, our future is largely unknown. We know that in a few billion years our star (the Sun) will blink out, but during that period we may see a dozen ice ages come and go, or a dozen blips in temperature where oceans expand and contract.
I do think that blaming all of the changes of our world on man alone is silly, but, at the same time, it is equally silly to stick our heads in the sand and expect that the human population of earth has no impact on it at all.
Despite all of our advances in science and technology, the one thing we have yet to be able to do on any scale is to control the weather.
I’m sure Mother Nature will always have the upper hand there.