Posted by
KWG on Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:52:53 PM
Previously, we visited the so-called “consensus” on global warming and the fact that it rests largely on postulation and anecdote. The always-vague group of “scientists” disagrees incredibly, and it cannot be claimed in any way that the debate on the topic is over. Now to examine some of the harder science and numbers involved.
The next question to ask is whether the planet is warming beyond what may be called a natural cycle. In the past, the Earth has warmed and cooled many different times, varying from periods where a huge segment of the planet was covered in ice to periods where Siberian Russia has been temperate, and all of these occurring well before humans ever laid so much as a footprint upon this world.
Looking at any major graph that has analyzed data, it must be concluded that the world has not currently warmed beyond what would be possible in a natural cycle. Depending on whom you ask, the world has been warmer than now no more than five hundred years ago during the “Medieval Warm Period,” and would be difficult to claim that the Earth has never been warmer. Indeed, the hottest years on record, according to NASA, are 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, and 1931. This all must be taken with a grain of salt, as measuring “global temperature” is difficult and often inaccurate, but the point is that we have gone through comparably warm spells before. Records, by the way, only began to be kept 150 years ago. In the past 150 years we’ve gone through comparable warm spells, not to even take into account the past 150 million!
This is not to discount the fact that humans and our way of life could influence the environment. It’s not possible to argue that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are not warmer than our current atmospheric make-up (just stand behind the exhaust pipe of a truck to see how warm our emissions can be). However, the greenhouse gas that is identified as the main culprit in the current warming trend, carbon dioxide, currently composes about 0.04% of the atmosphere, up from approximately 0.03% one hundred years ago (and the number has been projected to be about 0.05% in 2100).
Many environmentalists have attempted to make our planet out to be a precariously balanced chemical concoction, with any error one way or the other poised to tip it into oblivion. Some conservative skeptics, on the other hand, have invoked God in arguing that our planet could not have been created so dangerously and believe that mankind is arrogant and self-centered to think that we could so harm a wondrous and divine creation.
The truth is most likely somewhere in the middle. Earth’s atmospheric chemistry is certainly not such a combustible mixture as to overload or reach some kind of tipping point if we slightly alter the overall combination. It is naïve to think, however, that humans should not be stewards of the planet for future generations. Because carbon dioxide is the principal agitator in the global warming investigation, it’s been researched more thoroughly than many other elements in the atmosphere. And, indeed, it has had a pretty variable degree of fluctuation over the years due to many different factors. While humans have been the principal driver of CO2 variance in recent years, its incidence in the atmosphere has been higher in the past than it is now. To think that the recent human additions to the atmosphere will seriously cause catastrophic climate changes on a global scale is to invest in hyperbole.