Oceans to rise 50 feet! Temperatures soaring to new highs! It's a catastrophe! Or is it? With all the doom and gloom predictions by global warming alarmists, it's easy to get lost in the hype. But the fact of the matter is that the true cause of climate change is still very much a matter of debate, and at this point, what could have been a meaningful dialogue about the future of the planet has been co-opted by the marketing hype machine and turned into a business venture.
Case in point, the comically low attendance at Al Gore's global warming concert extravaganza: Live Earth. More people stayed home and watched the webcast than went to the event, which just goes to show that most people don't want to pay hard-earned money to be told to save energy by celebrities.
Before we can discuss manmade climate change, we have to understand how the planet's climate actually works. The earth goes through several cyclical patterns of warming and cooling, varying in scale from an 11-year cycle (sunspot activity) to a 100,000-year cycle. The planet began to emerge from its last major ice age approximately 18,000 years ago, and since then, the average temperature has increased by 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and oceans have risen a total of 300 feet. On a smaller scale, a "Medieval Warm Period" existed from about 1000 A.D. to 1350 A.D. with a little ice age occurring for the next 500 years - the cause of such ruinous events as the Irish Potato Famine. We are currently in a period similar to the "Medieval Warm Period" with comparable global temperatures.
So it seems plainly clear that the Earth will warm and cool regardless of human activity. But still, we must ask, how much are we affecting these cycles? Are we accelerating warming or cooling? In the 1940s, there was concern over atmospheric pollution contributing to a global cooling period by blocking out the sunlight. Such concern may seem farfetched now, with widespread concern about global warming, but it was a very real fear back then.
So then, with that in mind, let's look at some of the purported causes of global warming. The biggest cause assigned the blame for climate change is that of greenhouse gases and of those, carbon dioxide. All this talk about carbon neutral products and reductions in CO2 emissions fail to take into consideration some important points. The first one, and likely the most damning one, is that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity contribute less than 1 percent to the planet's greenhouse effect. There are far more unstoppable natural sources of greenhouse gases than there are from human activity. But would global warming alarmists bother to tell you this? Of course not, it would weaken their argument immensely. Even the United Nations' can't resist the urge for alarmism. Their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has had several members resign in protest, stating that the IPCC bases its recommendations on flat-out bad science, ignoring geological processes and blindly assuming that all CO2 entering the Earth's atmosphere will stay there for hundreds of years, turning the planet in to a giant pressure cooker.
But let's set aside the facts for a moment and suppose that greenhouse gases truly are the problem. Reduce our CO2 output or die, right? Wrong. Most definitions of greenhouse gases fail to include the most significant one: water vapor. Yes, water vapor, that gas that fills the room when you take a scalding hot shower or put the tea kettle on, or that rises into the air when you wash your car in the summer! Water vapor accounts for nearly 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. But more importantly, all those aforementioned activities account for less than 0.01 percent of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. So any greenhouse effect that is occurring is due predominately to Earth's biological and geological makeup, as any introductory astronomy course will tell you.
Now, despite all I've said, I'm not so short-sighted as to think we should just blindly keep burning oil and coal to meet our energy needs. While the global warming debate could likely continue endlessly, and there is still arguments over whether we have reached peak oil output or not, the fact remains that there is a limited supply of such non-renewable resources and even supposed alternatives such as nuclear power encounter the same problem of limited resources. Plainly put, there is only so much uranium available to be converted.
So while energy conservation is laudable, global warming is not so much the problem as is limited resource availability. The fuel for transportation has to come from somewhere, and when it runs out, if there are no alternatives, it's back to the 1800s for us. Even hybrid car owners aren't off the hook, as hybrid cars still produce pollutants and have a much higher cost to the environment to manufacture than normal cars. Couple that with the fact that the electric part of the hybrid engine only kicks in during stop and go driving, and they don't seem like such an amazing solution after all.
Perhaps the alarmists should try to be a little less short-sighted and worry about finding cost-effective global energy sources, instead of twisting science around to use as a marketing tool. Maybe all the money dumped into selling you that new hybrid car would be better used developing fusion power with hydrogen isotopes as a fuel source. But no one wants to read about deuterium-tritium reactions and plasma confinement fields. So the hype machine keeps on rolling. Now excuse me while I go hold my breath to prevent global warming.
Joshua Tasker is the opinions editor of The Daily Targum and doesn't own a car.
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