Alright I’ve had about enough of the Global Warming doom and gloomers. Blaming mankind for the steady increase in the earth’s temperatures is apparently all the rage. In the ABC News feature Global Warming Man-Made, Will Continue they claim global warming is apparently totally the responsibility of human kind and the United States in particular. And apparently will continue no matter what we do.
I’ll agree that it will continue no matter what we do, but I refuse to concede that mankind is totally responsible. It is possible that mankind has contributed to warming the earth in some small way. But it is scientific fact that the earth undergoes constant climate cycles. Their have been at least four global ice ages and I have no doubt there will be at least four more. And in between each of these four ice ages there has been a period of “Global Warming”. And I seriously doubt that mankind was responsible or even around for the other global warming periods on earth.
So if we didn’t cause those other Global Warming periods then what caused them. The consensus answer is that we need not look any further than the source of all heat and light on this earth, the sun. Just like the earth, the sun also goes through constant climate cycles, growing brighter and dimmer over long periods of time. The sun is not, has not and will not remain constant, a fact that the doom and gloomers seem to gloss over.
These cycles are the main cause of global warming. For example, at one point in time most of the North American continent was covered in a ice sheet up to a mile or more thick, are we to assume that the cavemen that existed at the time caused the ice sheets to melt with their campfires and uncovered the continent. No, but global warming started somehow and melted the ice sheets away, why. The sun output increased and started the melting of the ice sheets.
In fact other than a very brief period in the 1700 and 1800’s the earth has steadily warmed since the last ice age. Perhaps its rate of increase has increased in the last few years, perhaps it has increased because of man’s burning of fossil fuels, but it could just as easily be caused by the number of farm animals (they give off methane, lots of it) kept on earth or but far more likely yet another increase solar energy.
Now let me tackle the assumptions that global warming is invariably bad. We are told that costal cities will flood and millions of people will lose their homes to the rising oceans. Ok, the ocean will rise as it gets warmer I agree, but how do they know this, its because it always has in the past. This isn’t new, the ocean rises and falls during the climatic cycles and it will continue to do so. The folly is that man is stupid enough to build major cities next to the ocean, even after we knew the sea level is never constant and rises and falls with climatic cycles. If you don’t want to be flooded don’t build next to bodies of water, pretty simple isn’t it.
Next, consider for a moment the fact that vast areas of both North America and Asia are covered in ice or locked up in permafrost. As the earth warms, what happens, these vast areas become habitable and farmable by mankind. More food can be grown and more land is available for cities to be built. Far more, I argue, than will be lost to coastal flooding.
Now what about the terrible weather that is supposed to follow this global warming cycle. This is the most unreliable of all the global warming predictions, in 2005 the doom and gloomers were telling us that the spike in hurricanes was directly due to global warming and we believed them. What happened next, in 2006 we had the warmest year in the short time man has kept records, less than 200 years, and what about the hurricanes, we hardly had any, we had far fewer than we have in a “normal” year.
So how likely is global warming to create destructive enough weather to endanger us. If you look at history, not very. It is believed that during the various ages of the dinosaur, ages separated by “Ice Ages”. The average temperature was considerably warmer that now, and continued for millions of years at a time. If the increase in temperature was really likely to cause weather violent enough to endanger us how could the dinosaurs have survived. After all they didn’t have air conditioned homes to get out of the heat or away from the wind and rain.
Enough is enough the earth is going to get warmer but we all will live through it, get used to it.
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