by Kerry Thomas
September 27, 2005
Have you noticed? Scientists have confirmed the polar ice caps are shrinking. The atmosphere is warming. Global warming has hit the planet. The planet Mars. Probably as a direct result of that little Mars Rover we sent up there.
Meanwhile, back here on Planet Earth, the climate is
changing. The whole planet is
changing. But it’s been doing that
since it’s beginning. Remember learning
about ice ages and the age of the dinosaurs?
Earth has been heating and cooling for a very long time.
With all the recent environmental media hype about “global
warming” and the allegations that it is all the result of President Bush’s
environmental policies, it’s time to take a serious look at the situation.
Hurricanes are getting more frequent and more intense,
right? Well, according to the National
Hurricane Center, over the last 150 years there has been no stasticially
significant change in hurricane activity.
In fact, during the last 50 years, the number of severe hurricanes,
those at intensity levels 3-5, has actually decreased, when compared to the
previous 50 year period.
What about “greenhouse gases?” For several years there had been a slight but steady rise in
methane levels in the atmosphere. But
that has leveled off, and is even decreasing slightly in recent years. Better see what the cows have to say about
that. And while we’re at it, check the
amount of greenhouse gasses produced by oceanic plankton.
Surely all these cars and other sources of atmospheric
pollution in America have caused much of the global warming, right? Why then, during the 1960’s & 70’s, when
our cars were much less fuel efficient, were the scientists of that era warning
about an impending global ice age?
We often hear that flooding rains are increasing from global warming. This originates from a study of U.S. rainfall by federal climatologist Tom Karl, who found that there is an increasing fraction of U.S. rainfall coming from storms of more than two inches per day.
In their report to the 108th
Congress, the Cato Institute points out how the environmental lobby has seized
upon this fact without actual analysis of the results. What Karl found is that the majority of the
increase is in storms of between two and three inches per day. Those are not floods. With regard to storms capable of significant
flooding, those producing five or more inches of rainfall a day, the increase
is so slight as to be meaningless. On
the average, a person will now experience two more days in his entire expected
life span of 27,350 days in which it rains five or more inches.
But, surely, the Kyoto Protocol should have been agreed to
by President Bush, right? Well, first
of all, that was a treaty, which needs to be ratified by a 2/3 vote of the
Senate, not the President.
Second, when the Kyoto Protocol was first agreed to in 1997,
President Clinton asked scientists how much they would reduce the effect of
global warming. The results were
published in 1998 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
They found that if the entire Kyoto agreement were implemented, the
result would be a decrease in global temperatures of 0.07o C over 50 years, 0.14o C over the next 100 years.
It is worth
noting that the Kyoto Protocol virtually exempted countries like China
and India from regulatory restrictions on emissions, while calling for the
United States to reduce CO2 emissions to a level 7% below 1990 levels. The practical effect of such reductions on
the United States means a more than 30% reduction in CO2 levels from present levels.
Cato
also points out that “recently, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
scientist James Hansen, whose 1988 congressional testimony started the global
warming furor, wrote that reducing carbon dioxide is a highly ineffective means
of slowing global warming in the 50-year time horizon. Rather, he argues,
concentrating on the other greenhouse gases, such as CFCs and
methane (which has stopped increasing in the atmosphere for only partially
known reasons), is much more effective…than the costly Kyoto Protocol, which,
he wrote, ‘‘cast the developed and developing worlds as adversaries.’’
Could, maybe, the sun have something to do with global
warming? Take a look at the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
(SOHO) website and note the increase in solar activity recently. The sun goes through cycles just like
everything else does. And it’s odd how
these solar cycles just happen to correspond to changes here on Earth.