Posted on 01/30/2007 11:45:37 PM PST by neverdem
It may well turn out that George W. Bush's greatest service to the country won't involve terrorism or Iraq at all, but his steadfast refusal to be buffaloed into joining the panicky consensus on global warming.
Rumor had it that Bush intended to embrace the warming thesis at last in his State of the Union address. Instead Greens nationwide went into depressed tailspins as he called for an attack on the problem by means of technical advances, a curve ball very much in the old Bush mode, of a type that we've seen too little of recently. Bush is acting in defiance of much of the civilized world, led by a former vice-president and including the media, the entertainment community, the Democrats, most of the policy elite, that peculiar and never-before-encountered group known as "mainstream scientists", and now even corporations, eager to clamber aboard the Kyoto wagon while there's still room.
As James Lewis recently put it on these pages, global warming is most likely a crock. Some of us are old enough to remember similar hysterics over air pollution, overpopulation, and universal famine, none of which ever came to pass. The science behind warming is so full of lacunae, speculation, and outright fraud (e.g., the famed "hockey stick chart" purporting to show temperature levels over the past millennium while conveniently dropping both the medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age) to be in any way convincing.
One curious element involves certain facts that, on first consideration, would appear to be crucial but never seem to come up in debate. I have spent several years trying to track down the actual values of two numbers - the annual amount of carbon dioxide emitted by all human activities, and the amount of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere. There are as many answers as there are sources, the first ranging from 3 billion to 28 billion tons, the second from 750 billion tons to 2.97 x 1012 tons, a number so large that there's no common English word for it. Variations of this size - up to three orders of magnitude - suggest a serious lack of basic knowledge. The fact that it never comes up suggests that scientists are well aware of this. (It's doubtful we'll see the question addressed in this week's IPCC report either.)
* How warm was it during the LCO? Areas in the Midlands and Scotland that cannot grow crops today were regularly farmed. England was known for its wine exports.
* The average height of Britons around A.D. 1000 was close to six feet, thanks to good nutrition. The small stature of the British lower classes (and the Irish) later in the millennium is an artifact of lower temperatures. People of the 20th century were the first Europeans in centuries to grow to their "true" stature - and most had to grow up in the USA to do it.
* In fact, famine - and its partner, plague -- appears to have taken a hike for several centuries. We have records of only a handful of famines during the LCO, and few mass outbreaks of disease. The bubonic plague itself appears to have retreated to its heartland of Central Asia.
* The LCO was the first age of transatlantic exploration. When not slaughtering their neighbors, the Vikings were charting new lands across the North Atlantic, one of the stormiest seas on earth (only the Southern Ocean - the Roaring 40s - is worse). If you tried the same thing today, traveling their routes in open boats of the size they used, you would drown. They discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and a new world even beyond, where they found grape vines, the same as in England.
* The Agricultural Revolution is not widely known except among historians. Mild temperatures eased land clearing and lengthened growing seasons. More certain harvests encouraged experimentation among farmers involving field rotation, novel implements, and new crops such as legumes. While the thought of peas and beans may not thrill the foodies among us, they expanded an almost unbelievably bland ancient diet as well as providing new sources of nutrition. The result was a near-tripling of European population from 27 million at the end of the 7th century to 70 million in 1300.
* The First Industrial Revolution is not widely known even among historians. Opening the northern German plains allowed access to easily mined iron deposits in the Ruhr and the Saarland. As a result smithies and mills became common sights throughout Europe. Then came the basic inventions without which nothing more complex can be made - the compound crank, the connecting rod, the flywheel, followed by the turbine, the compass, the mechanical clock, and eyeglasses. Our entire technical civilization, all the way down to Al Gore's hydrogenmobile, has its roots in the LCO.
Questions to ponder,.....What if the earths rotation is slowing? What if the orbit is wobbling? What if the sun is getting larger?( As it cools it will get larger). There are many other questions to be answered, but you get the idea. It is impossible to change the atmosphere of the whole earth with 1/3 of the mass being land and 2/3rds water. Maybe the oceans are absorbing more heat, or belching methane out, who knows?
The Global Warming Myth is just to destroy the America's and allow all of us to ride moped's and live in tar paper shacks like the rest of the world. You will hear more and more the cry for the rich nations to pay a global tax of some sort to equalize the nations. This is just another way to slow us down and speed them up. The UN is dedicated to World Socialism. There is no room for capitalist's in their world. China will be belching out more carbon than us in just a few more years. Let's see how they react when they are recognized as the world's worst polluter.
Another interesting topic is the expanding deserts in Africa. They started to grow waaaay before the SUV came on the scene. Like I said in my first paragraph, the earth has been warming for at least 18,000 years with just a few cycles of cooling in between. Even before the 20,000 year start of warming, the ice age grew and shrank the ice sheet many times. Since about 18,000 years ago it has been a steady shrinkage except for some minor cooling periods. We have no control over it.
And what about the water vapor? The problem posed by CO2 is so small it's laughable. The fact that if man eliminated all man-made CO2 emissions the effect on warming would be negligible. Water vapor and methane cause far more greenhouse effects than does CO2.
The only reason that CO2 is targeted is because the dreaded cars emit it, and controlling cars, and people, is the real object of control for the UN IPCC.
What I want to know is why the 17,000 scientists and climatologists that say that man caused global warming is bunk are never heard from.
Maybe they actually want to stop people from breathing? I always thought of CO2 as good, plants love the stuff.
Trillion? Or is this England English, which have that whole "million million" thing?
That it is limited to anaerobic biological processes was actually found to be false last spring. Roughly half of the amount attributed to human causes is due to normal plant metabolism. In the 40 years it's been taught in schools, apparently no one actually checked.
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