Orlando Sentinel

Commentary

Charley Reese

Global warming? Don't work up sweat

Published May 6, 2001

Given a choice, which you won't be given, global warming is better than a new ice age.

If the past is any indication, we are at the end of a warming period and on the edge of new ice age. Feel the chill?

It's odd that most people have accepted as fact a yet-unproven hypothesis that the Earth is warming. Not long ago, a London newspaper, The Telegraph, published a story. Here's the lead: "Fresh doubt has been cast on evidence for global warming following the discovery that a key method of measuring temperature change has exaggerated the warming rate by almost 40 percent."

A team of scientists in the United Kingdom made this discovery. Of course, there was already a discrepancy between land-temperature measurements, which showed a slight warming, and atmosphere measurements, which showed a slight cooling.

Warm or cool, there isn't a lot we can do about it. There have been in recent geologic times about 17 ice ages. The old Earth cools down and warms up without any help at all from people. I expect it will continue to do so. Man has a huge ego, but he's hardly more than a mite on the back of a flea living on a cinder as far as the universe is concerned.

It might help to understand this flap about global warming if we pause to remember that the word "scientist" describes a vocation. Otherwise, scientists are just ordinary human beings -- fallible and subject to the whole array of vices and virtues that one finds in people. The fact that a scientist says something doesn't make it so.

As for global warming, there is a wide diversity of opinion among scientists, both pro and con. The whole deal is based on computer modeling, and some scientists argue that the models not only lack sufficient data but are too flawed to predict anything reliably.

Carbon dioxide, by the way, is not a pollutant. It's one of the key ingredients to life, and if greenhouse gases didn't keep the Earth warm, none of us would be here. All animals produce carbon dioxide and breathe it out; plants absorb carbon dioxide, as does the ocean. We also absorb carbon dioxide every time we drink a soda pop. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is only .04 percent of the atmosphere. Water vapor is about 2 percent and also a greenhouse gas (traps some of the heat). Most of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen (74 percent) and oxygen (23 percent).

Scientists don't really understand completely the climatological changes that have already occurred. Speculation about what may occur is just that -- speculation.

At any rate, carbon dioxide is good for plant growth, and warming is good for the human race. And a new ice age would play heck with the welfare of the human race. A new ice age would shorten the growing season everywhere and make more of the Earth unfit for human habitation.

What drives the global-warming propaganda machine is not science but political and ideological goals. It is not a fact. The idea that carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuel will cause the Earth to warm is as yet an unproven hypothesis.

Some of the factors that geologists believe affect climate are slight changes in the Earth's tilt, variations in output from the sun, changes in ocean currents, even variations in Earth's orbit around the sun, not to mention the occasional large meteor or comet whacking us.

We would be better off to dismiss the global-warming premise and simply concentrate on improving the place where we live, as well as pursuing research to find an energy source when fossil fuels run out, which they inevitably will in the distant future.

It would also help if human beings would get rid of this notion that they are masters of the universe. We are not. We are a negligible factor. If each of us honestly seeks the answer to the question, "What do I really control?" we will find out the answer is, "Not much."

The same answer applies to the question, "What does man really know about the universe?" If you culled the facts from the theories, guesses, speculations and sometime downright fabrications, the little pile of facts left over could all be published in a fairly small volume. And most of them would consist of measurements.

The world is full of mysteries and one of them is certainly what the weather will be like 50 years from now. There are a lot of folks in the vocational field of science who are not much different from the old medicine men who traveled in a wagon, hawking remedies and cure-alls.

It is a good idea not to worry about things you can't control or tasks that are impossible and to concentrate on doing what you can do in your own vicinity. Most of the hell that people experience is not of cosmic origin. We originate it by our misdeeds and neglect. Burning fossil fuels, for example, is not nearly as damaging to the future as failing to love, nurture and educate children.

Reach Charley Reese at 407-420-5315 or creese@orlandosentinel.com

-- Anonymous, May 06, 2001