by Michael Solomon

extracted from Chapter XII of 'Where Did My America Go?'

2007

from BooksGoogle Website


 


"Henny Penny, the sky is falling"

Chicken Little

 


I poured a glass of water for myself.

 

As I placed about four ice cubes in the glass, I knew from experience that the water would get colder and chill. It was at that moment that I started to think about global warming and the Polar Ice Cap.


I asked myself, if the ice is melting and falling into the oceans, why are the oceans getting warmer instead of cooler? It just does not make sense to me. Can someone explain it to me?


I keep hearing the political environmentalists telling me how the recent hurricanes that have formed in the oceans are due to global warming. If hurricanes form in warm water and the ice cap is melting, where is the logic in all of this?


So I started to research it and what I found somewhat confuses me.

  • If man and his industrial waste machines, which we call factories, are causing the glaciers to start melting in Greenland, if the Polar Icecap is melting, why have they been shrinking since the late 1880s long before our roads were clogged with automobiles and our air was being saturated with all the industrial waste being spewed out?

  • Yes, there may have been some shift in Polar Ice and some breaking off, but does that mean the world is about to flood?

  • Are the oceans really getting larger?

  • Are the shorelines increasing in size?

  • Does it not seem logical that all this movement in Antarctica may be no different from normal shifts in the earth's climate over time?

  • When an earthquake occurs, does that mean that molten magna is going to start oozing up from the earth and scorch everything in sight?

Maybe in Hollywood...


I have trouble believing the North is melting because of man, just as I have trouble believing that pomperoneous Al Gore, the biggest proponent of global warming, invented the Internet and was the subject of Eric Segal's novel Love Story.


After all, let us examine what happened when he jumped on the bandwagon of the environmentalists over the spotted owl issue regarding the federal timber lands of the North West in the U.S.

 

The spotted owl is a bird that makes its home in the old growth forests of our most northwestern states. The forest that it inhabits also happens to be a major lumber area. A bill was passed placing the spotted owl on the endangered species list. It was claimed that the tree harvesting was causing the demise of the owls and they could become extinct.


The bill that passed stated that you could not disturb any timber within a 1.3-mile radius of any spotted owl nest or activity site.


That is the equivalent of approximately 2,500 acres of land, which equals over 100 million square feet of room to cohabit. My bedroom is about 325 square feet - more than enough room to cohabit with my wife. We are certainly larger than any pair of spotted owls.


What was the fallout of this bill? Thousands of lumber industry workers were laid-off as lumber mills closed and lumber harvesting came to a standstill in many areas.


The lumber distributors and building material suppliers found themselves importing lumber from Canada. The price of lumber rose to record prices. In March of 1993 lumber prices were at an all-time high. These higher prices were reflected in the cost of new homes and building materials.


Do you know what happened next? It has now been discovered that it was not the farming of trees that was causing the demise of the spotted owl. It was found to be its distant cousin the barred owl that was attacking the spotted owl, hunting them and resulting in them becoming endangered.

 

I think they call it survival of the fittest or Mother Nature at work.


The other problem is that because the harvesting of trees was halted, the forest grew denser then ever before. This new growth led to more forest fires, which displaced the spotted owl even more. Most of the fires were started by lightning strikes. When they occurred, the owls just flew away.

 

This was exactly what happened when the trees were harvested for lumber. Only this time, it was only the owls that were displaced; the lumberjacks were displaced years earlier.


I have not heard an apology to the displaced workers of the lumber industry from Al Gore.

 

Do you think they are outraged? Are you?


Let me get back to global warming.

 

Global warming started long before the "Industrial Revolution" and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Global warming began 18,000 years ago, as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age - a time when much of North America, Europe, and Asia lay buried beneath great sheets of glacial ice.


Earth's climate and the biosphere have been in constant flux, dominated by ice ages and glaciers for the past several million years. We are currently enjoying a temporary reprieve from the deep freeze.


Approximately every 100,000 years, Earths climate warms up temporarily.

 

These warm periods, called interglacial periods, appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice-age climate. At year 18,000 and counting, our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer its end than its beginning.


Global warming during Earth's current interglacial warm periods has greatly altered our environment and the distribution and diversity of all life.

 

For example:

  • Approximately 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently to halt the advance of glaciers, and sea levels worldwide began to rise.
     

  • By 8,000 years ago, the land bridge across the Bearing Strait was drowned, cutting off the migration of man and animals to North America.
     

  • Since the end of the Ice Age, Earth's temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet. Forests have returned where once there was only ice.

During ice ages, our planet is cold, dry and inhospitable, supporting few forests but plenty of glaciers and deserts. Like a spread of colossal bulldozers, glaciers have scraped and pulverized vast stretches of Earth's [...]


 

 

 

[...] During the last 100 years there have been two general cycles of warming and cooling recorded in the U.S. We are currently in the second warming cycle. Overall, the U.S. temperatures show no significant warming trend over the last 100 years. This has been well-established but not well-publicized.


Each year government press releases declare the previous year to be the "hottest year on record."

 

The UN's executive summary on climate change, issued in January 2001, insists,

"The 20th century was the warmest in the last millennium."

The news media distribute these stories and people generally believe them to be true.

 

However, as most climatologists know, these reports generally are founded on ground-based temperature readings, which are misleading. The more meaningful and precise orbiting satellite data for the same periods (which are generally not cited by the press) have year after year showed no warming.


Has manmade pollution in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases caused a runaway greenhouse effect and global warming?

 

Before joining the mantra, consider the following:

  1. The idea that manmade pollution is responsible for global warming is not supported by historical fact. The period known as the Holocene Maximum is a good example. It is so named because it was the hottest period in human history. The interesting thing is that this period occurred approximately 7500 to 4000 years B.P. (before present) - long before humans invented industrial pollution.
     

  2. CO2 in our atmosphere has been increasing steadily for the last 18,000 years - long before humans invented smokestacks. Unless you count campfires and intestinal gas, man played no role in the pre-industrial increases.
     

  3. Total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28% of the greenhouse effect. Approximately 99.72% of the greenhouse effect is due to natural causes - mostly water vapor and traces of other gases, which we can do nothing at all about. Eliminating human activity altogether would have little impact on climate change.

Consider the following facts about carbon dioxide:

  • Of the 186 billion tons of CO2 that enter earth's atmosphere each year from all sources, only 6 billion tons are from human activity. Approximately 90 billion tons come from biological activity in earth's oceans and another 90 billion tons from such sources as volcanoes and decaying land plants.
     

  • CO2 is odorless, colorless and tasteless. Plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen as a waste product. Humans and animals breathe oxygen and emit CO2 as a waste product. Carbon dioxide is a nutrient, not a pollutant, and all life - plants and animals alike - benefit from more of it. All life on earth is carbon-based and CO2 is an essential ingredient. When plant-growers want to stimulate plant growth, they introduce more carbon dioxide.
     

  • CO2 that goes into the atmosphere does not stay there but is continually recycled by terrestrial plant life and earth's oceans.
     

  • If we were in a global warming crisis today, even the most aggressive and costly proposals for limiting industrial carbon dioxide emissions would have a negligible effect on the global climate.

Environmentalists, news commentators, and special interest groups that make inaccurate and misleading statements about global warming and climate change make the case for a greenhouse problem.

 

Even though people may be skeptical of such rhetoric initially, after a while people start believing that it must be true because we hear it so often. The following quotes are from notables who have championed the cause for global warming.


Stephen Schneider (leading advocate of the global 'warming theory') in an interview for Discover magazine, October 1989:

"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

Former President Bill Clinton in a 1997 address to the United Nations:

"In the United States... we have first to convince the American People and the Congress that the climate problem is real."

Petr Chylek (Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia), commenting on reports by other researchers that Greenland's glaciers are melting. (Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001):

"Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to find a way to scare the public.. .and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are."

 

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