The Global Warming Debate
by Ian Spartacus - September, 2011 A one sided global warming debate began on your TV with melting polar ice caps, rising oceans, and starving bears. Al Gore wrote ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, received the Nobel Prize, and arrogantly announced the global warming debate is over, essentially closing off peer review. The liberal Democrats, with their super majority and arm twisting techniques perfected during the passing of health care, quickly got to work on Cap and Trade Bill HR2454. It was passed in the House, by Nancy Pelosi, on June 26, 2009, with a bare margin of 219 to 212. A cornerstone of the liberal agenda, cap and trade threatens a framework of socialist bureaucratic control over the world energy market. HR2454 would have forced us to conserve energy by making it more expensive to buy, but questions about the credibility of data Al Gore’s Nobel Prize is based on, and cold 2008 and 2009 winters, caused legislation to stall in the Senate. The left has invested a large sum to gain control of world energy, and their unwavering insistence that global warming is man-made shows they haven’t given up, yet the facts are becoming evident that California glaciers doubled in size from 1951 to 2002, Antarctica is freezing from the bottom up, ocean currents cause water levels around the world to vary, and polar bears are thriving in the Arctic. Should we believe alarmists that CO2 levels might cause an environmental catastrophe, when we can’t get an accurate two week forecast of the weather? The story of scam artists claiming the sky is falling is older than history itself, only today, the scammers are awarding our stimulus money to scientists for corroborating their leftist agenda, essentially bribery and fraud. The EPA estimates that human activity produces 27 billion tons of CO2 yearly, while forests and oceans absorb 200 billion tons. |
Our atmosphere is so vast that it would take all the world's cars and light trucks running for a year to produce a layer of CO2 1/4 inch thick. Records since 1960 show a rise in CO2 from 320 ppm to 390 ppm, but if you compare that to proxy tests of levels at the time of the dinosaurs, which ranged from 1800 to 7000 ppm, we are presently CO2 starved. It was hotter and more humid then, but a few million years later, in the Ordovician Period, CO2 was at 4400 ppm during an Ice Age when, according to greenhouse theory, it should have been very hot.
There is evidence that global warming occurs naturally in cycles. Every 100,000 years or so, we experience an ice age at the end of a 15,000 to 20,000 year warming period. We are about 18,000 years into the present warming period, so shouldn’t the alarm instead be over a CO2 shortage? Beginning in 1645 and continuing through 1715, there was a cold period (conveniently omitted from Al Gore’s book) known as the Little Ice Age, during which, astronomers noticed a lack of sunspot activity. The same phenomena occurred in 2008 and 2009: also unusually cold years. The amount of solar energy that reaches earth depends on shape, tilt angle, and wobble of its orbit, which changes to elliptical in 100,000 year cycles, the same cycle as Ice Ages. At maximum orbit apogee, sunlight travels a longer distance to earth, so temperatures are cooler. When axial tilt varies, temperatures in one hemisphere heat up while the other becomes colder. Wobble causes contrasting seasons: summers unusually hot, winters unusually cold. So global warming has many variables that make the cause harder to pinpoint than the left would have us believe. A credible theory can therefore only be determined by the peer review process and unbiased media coverage. |
Are we so gullible as to think Cap and Trade will lower carbon emissions? The Cap and Trade bureaucracy will skim billions off energy revenues, and can only justify its existence if CO2 levels continue to rise. Neither should we sabotage our energy policy without a practical alternative in place. Our president’s gulf drilling moratorium raises prices at a time when we need stability. His $2 billion commitment of our taxpayer’s money to a Brazilian oil company, for drilling in the Gulf at a depth of 2777 meters, after banning Americans from drilling at 1500 meters, is arbitrary and senseless. His $49.5 million bailout of General Motors produces electric cars that increase CO2 emissions, because they will be charged by coal generated electricity. Contrary to Obama, that bailout was never paid back: all but $6.5 billion was forgiven in bankruptcy court, and the rest was just refinanced by another government agency to make GM eligible for borrowing more.
The competitiveness of CO2 free technologies for electricity production is limited in comparison to coal, oil, and natural gas. Hydropower, which supplies 16% of the world’s electricity, has a risky future due to climate change fears. Atomic power, supplying 13%, has a growing waste disposal problem and it is a target for terrorists. Renewables supply only 1% of our electricity. The cost of wind turbines and solar panels limits competitiveness. Most of our renewable electricity has been produced in the southwest, since 1985, using concentrated solar power. This process needs no fuel, and produces electricity at a cost under 6 cents per kwh. It is ironic, however, that the main obstacle to expansion of this clean, efficient technology has been the objections of environmentalist Democrats who complain about global warming. |
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