Part I: Who are we saving the planet for?
Schemes are get increasingly more bizarre to ’save the planet’ from global warming. Popular scientists (ie those who know how to pander to the media) are increasingly prone to throwing out words like “irreversible,’ ‘catastrophic,’ ‘dire’ and ‘terrible’ when talking about global warming. The only ‘real’ threat that the whole global warming scare should be highlighting but isn’t (because it doesn’t suit their cause), is that we are running out of cheap oil – and are very badly prepared for any alternatives, especially with regards to transportation. If we ignore that, what exactly are these irreversible catastrophic events which are apparently going to assail the planet?
Melting arctic ice cap
This one is thrown out there as an acute consequence of global warming. But what does it mean? The arctic ice cap is in balance with the water levels of the world so the arctic ice cap melting alone will not contribute to sea level changes.
There is concern about no polar ice making the world hotter due to the albedo effect, but there was no polar ice cap 2-3 million years ago, and the world certainly didn’t end then, and it was not considerably hotter or colder then either.
Of course, there are the polar bears… More concern is shown for global warming effecting the hunting grounds of the polar bears than the fact it is man hunting the polar bears which is causing any demise in their numbers. Polar bear stew anyone?
Rising sea levels
This is bandied around consistently. Why? The much beloved IPCC estimates sea levels will rise by at best, 59cm this century. Will 59cm or even 1m seriously encroach upon many people living along the coast? Most of the ‘rising sea level’ would be due to thermal expansion, not melting polar ice caps, so only select coastlines (ie warmer ones) would be effected marginally. On the other hand… if I build a place on the beach, I’ll have less distance to walk for a swim… Hmmm. Not so good in a storm surge though!
Greenland ice cap melts
For all the fear out there about Greenland’s ice cap melting and adding 6m of to the global sea level, it won’t happen this century! The glacial edges are getting as manky now as when the vikings colonised Greenland during the last warming period in the middle ages. But the ice over most of Greenland is over 2km think and sits in a huge bowl. At worst, we’ll end up with a very large beautiful deep blue lake in the middle, but alas… we won’t see that this century. It will take 1000s of years for Greenland to melt.
Antarctic ice cap melts
A very small fragment of the northern extreme of the Antarctic Peninsula is experiencing higher than average warming – its the banana belt of the Antarctic! The rest of Antarctica is not. In fact, much is made that warming temperatures further north are causing more precipitation to fall on Antarctica so it is in effect, growing. Elsewhere, the ice sheet, has formed a big depression in the ground. If the postulated methane blowouts 50 million years ago couldn’t precipitate melting of the main Antarctic ice sheet, a few 100 years of human-made carbon-dioxide emission won’t even be noticed by the ice sheet down there. And again, it cannot melt in the next 100 years!
However, the poor penguins are feeling the heat a little. With the advent of tourist ships steaming down there in old Russian ice-strengthened, uneconomic sea vessels, it is becoming evident that penguins are heading south to nest, Lo and behold, as they head further south, ancient rookeries are being revealed by the retreating snowline -could it be this disgruntled birds have been migrating up and down the Antarctic coastline in response to temperature fluctuations far longer then humans have been warming up the atmosphere?
Wildlife is dying
Until the last few years, many scientists claimed we were in a phase of mass extinction – man-made extinction. Then it got slightly modified to say man-made mega-fauna mass extinction because really, it was any animal that was ‘large enough’ to provide us with food and souvenirs that was being hunted to extinction. After all, we’re not doing a very good job of eradicating rabbits or rats, are we?!
But suddenly – it has become global warming which is eradicating all the frogs of the world… the birds and even the growing population of polar bears…
We at the Dappled Planet would venture to say that actually, it is man hunting and/or invading many habitats of animals, plants and birds which is destroying them, not global warming. In the past, if a frog felt a bit hot or cold in its pond, it would move to another. Now it may have to cross a road busy with trucks hauling away the very trees that gave it shade. Plants used to send spores on the winds – but now they fall into fields covered in pesticides and herbicides which kills them. Oaks uses to sow their acorns, but now they are picked up, and either eaten, turned into toys or mulched. Panda bears used to roam the bamboo forests of china but would now have to cross vast tracts of bamboo-free farmland. And this is only the beginning… For probably nearly every animal or plant heading for extinction on this planet, you will probably find a man made reason is behind its decrease and we’re not talking something as fuzzy as global warming!
And lets face it, no where in the geologic history as global warming been for a mass extinction! Global cooling has though…
Methane burps
OK… These are interesting and unknown… It was thought 50 million years ago there were some methane burps. They caused the world to become exceedingly hot for a few decades – only decades – before the methane was sucked out of the system. Bush fires were very common apparently in the changed atmosphere and some fragile species were wiped out. But there was no great ‘extinction’ due to these burps and none of the Mass extinction’s in Earth’s history have ever been attributed to global warming! In fact, the dinosaurs ruled in an time when the world was 10 degrees warmer than present and only died out as a combined onslaught of excessive volcanic emissions and meteorite impact changed the atmosphere and made overall conditions cooler and more acidic…
True, there are some scientists who claim we are in the middle of a mass extinction right now, but not due to global warming, or if so, it only contributes mildly to the grand slaughter. No, they tend to advocate that man himself is more destructive, hunting species to extinction and clearing vast tracts of land to grow non-native plants and build cities, destroying vast ecosystems in the process. Ouch! Don’t we need to do more to stop this raping and pillaging of the land?!
Increased storm activity
Storms rely on a hear difference between the polar regions and equatorial regions. With global warming smoothing things out, there should be less storms. With that meteorological fundamental, for every scientist that states warming of the oceans will cause increased hurricane activity, there are more saying warming will not have an effect on hurricane’s. It depends what variables they put in their models (or where they are getting their funding from). And since not one scientist on the planet can predict an El Nino let alone the weather in 3 days time, it is a bit dubious to rely on computer-assisted hurricane modelling.
And the only reason to ‘fear’ hurricane activity is because people live along the coasts of places subjected to hurricane’s. Might it not be better to just adjust your life accordingly and make sure that whatever you build can stand up to a hurricane? New Orleans would have stood up to Hurricane Katrina – if the city officials had listened to the engineers who for decades had been saying the levee’s would not survive a direct hurricane hit..
But… All of the above are not enough to seriously point to a reason for the hysteria of the ‘catastrophic’ results of global warming. None of the above are going to do much more than make things uncomfortable for people. Running out oil is going to seriously impact upon people! And running out of oil also means that it is impossible to achieve the levels of CO2 that seem to alarm global warming fanatics. Again, if we ignore that fact, there are an awful lot of silly solutions being proposed which have a greater impact on the environment than global warming, and alarmingly, no one seems to care in the rush to ‘reduce CO2 emissions.’
