Dec. 7, 2009, the 68th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, has become another day of infamy. On the opening day of the Copenhagen global warming conference, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared carbon dioxide (CO2) a danger to public health. You better stop it! Don’t take another breath, you evil polluter!
A naturally occurring substance that is essential for life on earth has now been declared a dangerous pollutant.
All plants require carbon dioxide which they use during photosynthesis to make nutrients and release oxygen. They actually grow faster if more CO2 is available in the atmosphere.
Plants and animals emit CO2 during normal respiration. Volcanoes, geysers and other natural phenomena release CO2. Let’s bomb Yellowstone to stop the pollution caused by geysers and other geothermal activity!
Complex mechanisms control the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. For example, the oceans absorb large quantities of CO2. Climate scientists can’t account for where all the CO2 emitted by human industrial activity has gone because the earth has robust mechanisms to adjust to increases in CO2.
CO2 today makes up about 380 parts per million of the earth’s atmosphere. That’s a 30 percent increase from 150 years ago, but it still a tiny amount, 0.038 percent, of the atmosphere.
Humans have contributed to this increase in CO2 by burning fossil fuels. Is this cause for alarm? Should we abandon the enormous progress that has allowed billions of people to lead better lives and instead return to the 19th century? We certainly would decrease the human population, causing billions of CO2 polluters to starve.
CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases trap the sun’s heat. Water vapor, a major greenhouse substance, has a much larger effect on temperatures. If you live in a cold climate, you have experienced the coldest winter nights when the sky is clear, while temperatures drop much less when there is a solid cloud greenhouse cover. This is a simple example of the power of water vapor which is not accounted for in global warming models.
There are sources of energy that do not emit CO2. Nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams are two examples. These are never proposed by global warming alarmists because of their irrational fear of nuclear energy and because of the effect that hydroelectric dams have on the surrounding environment (i.e. pristine natural land gets flooded).
Wind and solar energy are the favorite “alternatives” of global warming alarmists. The only issue is that we can only produce a tiny fraction of our energy needs with currently available technology from wind and from the sun. And environmentalists object even to these when they threaten to affect their rich, liberal sponsors. For example, residents of Cap Cod have objected to large offshore windmill farms since they despoil the view from their ocean-front mansions and on their yachts.
As nations become wealthier and fossil fuels eventually become scarcer and more expensive, human ingenuity will find ways to harvest energy from other sources. Rich countries care more about air pollution (not CO2, but the nasty stuff) than poorer countries where the dominant environmental concerns are things like clean water and sanitary disposal of sewage.
The global warming advocates claim that they want to accelerate technological advances towards non-fossil fuel sources of energy by imposing higher taxes on oil and by cap and trade schemes. This is the argument if we take them at their word and ignore the fact that former communists and socialists who always wanted to centrally control human freedom have flocked to the global warming cause as a new way to achieve the goals of their discredited ideologies.
We are going through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Does it really make sense to further damage our economies by imposing enormously costly curbs on carbon emission when the science on the effects of tiny amounts of additional CO2 is far from settled and certainly no cause for doomsday scenarios?
And how are the policies contemplated in Copenhagen going to affect the poorest countries? They are not going to suddenly install solar panels on their huts. Instead they will be deprived of oil and coal as cheap sources of electricity. They will be forced cut down forests to burn wood creating far more pollution (real pollution, not CO2) than they would if they had access to fossil fuels. Do global warming advocates not care about the rain forests that environmentalists always want to protect? Maybe the global warming fanatics figure that people in poor countries will just die in greater numbers, thereby reducing the number of human beings, those terrible, evil polluters who emit CO2 with every breath.
And why should we spend aid on poor countries to help them get cleaner water, eliminate malaria and treat rampant HIV infections, if we can instead put resources to prevent a hypothetical “problem” that has become the obsession of rich leftists? The evil George Bush was surely wrong to make expensive drugs treating HIV available to millions of people in Africa.
If you have read to this point, you are still breathing and emitting dangerous CO2 into the atmosphere. So stop now, hold your breath and sacrifice yourself to the global warming cause! The attendants of the Copenhagen summit will pollute the earth with more than 40,000 tons of CO2, so, as an insignificant human being, mitigate their pollution for a noble cause and stop breathing!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I thought I would leave my first comment, Thank you and I will want to read more from you.
Thank you for reading Florida Pundit. Feel free to provide feedback on what you like / don’t like or what you like to see in the future. I just started this a couple of months ago and will continue to build this to be a voice of sanity in difficult times.
Florida Pundit
It is people like you that spout misinformation that will influence the undereducated into doing nothing! Global warning is not hypothetical. Both the north and south ice sheets are melting at a rate that exceeds, yes EXCEEDS, previous worst-case senarios developed by IPCC scientists in 2007. Sea levels are rising and will continue to rise for centuries after CO2 levels are stabilized, if indeed we can stabilize them. I am a cynic so do not belive that small minded people like yourself will change their view-point; or that the ignorant will change their viewpoints or might even do a little research to find out for themselves what is real, because of anything I might say here. I suppose you can hope your property that is a mile inland will be waterfront property by 2020. No worries for the mansions on the coast now. Their carbon footprint is too high already.
Yes, I drive, and yes, I breathe, and yes, I am working toward getting off the grid by using solar and wind energy. But, the cynic in me say, “Too little, too late.”
If you want to debate the causes of global warming and what, if anything, needs to be done, you need to start using facts and logical arguments. The article you respond to does not say that there is no global warming. The earth has been around for billions of years and has supported life for at least hundreds of millions of years. Climate has always changed. More recently, the earth has been warming for about 200 years after experiencing several centuries of global cooling. The question is not whether there is global warming or not, but 1) whether any of the changes are man-made, 2) what the consequences are if some part of warming is caused by humans, and 3) what we can do about them. If you read beyond the emotional headlines, you will find that the humans the degree to which humans contribute to global warming is debatable. Even if humans contribute significantly through CO2 emissions, there is little we can do in the next few decades and the impact of emerging economies like China and India will dwarf our emissions. Regarding what we can do about detrimental effects such as flooding due to rising sea levels, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who believes in man-made global warming, has shown that it is more cost effective and realistic to deal with consequences of rising sea levels when they become a problem than destroying our economies by draconian cuts in carbon emissions. Read Lomborg’s book “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” available at Amazon.