- Thomas Richard
If you've never been to any of the global warming alarmist's sites, you're missing out on some of the greatest examples of what I call coincidental science. If you're wondering what that means, I'll give you an exaggerated example:
Each year, millions of schoolchildren return to school in September. Shortly thereafter, autumnal breezes swoop in, temperatures drop, and winter stakes its claim. So it stands to reason that if we simply cancel our children's return to school, we can avoid winter altogether. One precedes the other, so it must be true. To drive the point home, when school lets out in May, we experience the hottest months of the year.
This is also known as a specious argument. Seemingly plausible, but in reality wrong. It's nothing more than a very remarkable confluence of events with absolutely no scientific connection.
So it comes as no surprise, at least to me, to visit sites by the Cassandra's of climate change and see this type of scientific reasoning being used by laypeople and even scientists to distort and confuse. The
Huffington Post is one of the worst offenders, but by no means the only.
One of the most persuasive, and pervasive, arguments I read all the time is that there are 6.5 billion people on the planet. They estimate there is no way that 6.5 billion people could not be having a
negative affect on the climate.
Accordingly, that's a lot of people pumping, piping, and putting all manner of nastiness into the air, people driving carbon-spewing vehicles, people burning coal, oil, gas, and every one of us exhaling CO2, day after day. The people and their CO2 passions, they reason, are causing any abnormal weather. It seems people don't need people, they need Al Gore. And fast.
I've even heard both presidential candidates say as much, one more eloquently than the other. Unfortunately, this is about as scientific as running into an old flame at the local Starbuck's five years after you broke up and immediately thinking you're being stalked. A friend in AA told me they have a saying that there's 'no such thing as coincidences.' That turn of phrase might be helpful to a recovering addict and his belief in a higher power, but an anethema in science.
Of course the 6.5 billion people argument sounds perfectly reasonable. More people using more resources contribute more CO2. Problem is, it's entirely coincidental. Or put another way, it hasn't been disproved. Thousands of mentally ill patients during the 1930s were forcibly sterilized under the theory that this would end mental illness. This, of course, was proven false.
For 50 years the geological community snubbed the theory of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener. It was finally proven true through indisputable evidence via an acceptable explanation (plate tectonics).
And even the 700,000-year timeline that Al Gore famously used in his docudrama actually showed that a CO2 rise came hundreds of years AFTER a planet-wide warming. He inconveniently left that part out. Coincidence? In this case, no.
I'm now going to throw out some accepted scientific facts (not theories) so that once and for all we can put the population-equals-global-warming bugaboo to bed.
We've never had this many people on the planet so we have no guideposts on how much is too much, and what affect that or any amount will have. We also don't know if the population will begin to show a negative countdown, i.e., more people die than are born.
CO2 is not a pollutant. Without it, plant life on Earth would perish. There was, at last count, 390 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere (even this figure is disputed by leading scientists). This would equal .039% of the atmosphere. CO2 is just not that powerful a greenhouse gas, especially compared to
methane.
Dr Andy Thorpe, an economist at the University of Portsmouth, explained that 200
cows burp the annual equivalent amount of methane to the energy produced by a family car being driven 111,850 miles. They produce large amounts of methane as they digest their food and then belch out most of it through their mouths. One cow can belch 700 litres (740 quarts) of methane in a single day. Cow burps just don't make the flashy headlines that man-made global warming does.
According to the International Erosion Control Association, the world's cattle herd was 1.53 billion in 2001. If you add in sheep and goats, the herd size increases to 3.3 billion. This number does not include the number of 'wildlife' animals, such as lions, tigers, and bears. Camels and horses are also not included in the count.
Methane gas is 20 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. It also has a higher warming potential and a longer lifetime in the atmosphere than CO2. It is estimated to be 20% of the greenhouse warming effect. The majority of greenhouse gases is water vapor at around 95%.
According to Monte Heib, P.E., "CO2 levels in the atmosphere today are NOT at record high levels. Carbon Dioxide is such a small component of Earth's atmosphere [barely 390 ppmv] that…Compared to former geologic times Earth's atmosphere is CO2 impoverished."
Warming periods and cooling periods are also directly linked to sunspot activity. We are currently in a spotless sun period and the temperatures are bearing this out. During the Medieval Warm Period that lasted 400 years and was warmer than it is today there were far less people on the earth, and most important, we were not an industrialized world. No trains, planes, or automobiles. No factories, either. This warm period was followed by the 'little ice age,' which also lasted hundreds of years and came to an end during the early 19th century. It wasn't until the 1950s a true industrial revolution took off.
18,000 years ago the planet started warming up, a gradual process after 100,000 years of Ice Ages. Since then, the Earth's temperature has risen about 16°F. It will continue to do so before this interglacial period will end and we will return to another Ice Age period. This has been proven by ice core samples and other methods, and it has nothing do with our population. When you hear alarmists rant about a 1°F rise in the last hundred years keep in mind this is what the Earth has been doing for millions of years. Warming, then cooling, repeat.
Unfortunately, we won't be around to see this happen, but not before generations of people spend enormous amounts of money, pass onerous laws, and destroy an economy already on the brink.
For 50 years the scientific community fought tooth and nail that continental drift was a pie-in-the-sky theory and used consensus to back up their claims and maintain the status quo. How long will it take before the global warming theory is finally disproved? Let's hope it's not after a hundred years of no significant warming. We should know better than to keep following mob mentality.
Thomas Richard runs the non-profit, non-partisan site
Climate Change Fraud which gives voice to the other side of the global warming debate. For 15 years he has freelanced as a web design consultant when he’s not debunking the common misconceptions of climate change.
