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Mark Harris: Gore's 'Fever' Dangerously Wrong Dr. Mark Harris
At the time of the crime, the suspect is nowhere in the vicinity. Why have the greatest increases in global warming been recorded in high latitudes where carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations are lowest? Because the problem isn't carbon dioxide (CO2). Most heat absorption in the so-called "CO2 wavelengths" is actually done by water vapor. Compared to CO2, there is 100 times more water vapor in the atmosphere. So, even if CO2 were an equally effective absorber of heat rays, which it isn't, enormous CO2 increases would produce negligible increases in heat. Plus, over 96% of atmospheric CO2 comes from natural, not "man made" sources. In fact without water vapor to trap heat, most of the planet would resemble the poles, i.e. buried under thick layers of ice. Thus on the question of atmospheric temperatures, natural materials and events do, and have always overshadowed man. Story Continues Below
Here's an example: in the 1920s my father, and his friends, often wore a jacket in the tropical Caribbean. Why? In 1908 a scorching visitor (likely a comet) from deep space struck Siberia, and six years before Mount Pelee erupted in the Caribbean... Both threw huge thick dust and ash clouds high into the stratosphere, where they stayed for years, reflecting solar radiation and chilling the Earth for the next 30 years. Average temperatures fell 5º C between 1902 and 1910, recovering slowly by 1937. Ignore that drop, and Earth's average temperature looks nearly constant over the last 150 years, up to and including 2007. But delete the years preceding 1902, and presto, it looks like warming begins in 1910 (which it didn't, only the recovery)! Especially as that rebound coincides with increasing CO2 levels! This return (no increase) is currently being touted as the "beginning of global warming"! It gets worse. Enter, the 1970s. With fossil fuelled CO2 levels still going up, enter Newsweek. The April 28, 1975 issue on page 64 predicted: "The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." The title of the article? "The Cooling World" describing a coming ice-age! So it seems, with the chilly 1970s, another correlation is born: "Whenever the temperature changes, opinions on impending catastrophes move in that same direction". Still, for the proponents of long-term change - Is equilibrium being maintained, or lost? Where is the hard data? Global temperatures have never been static. But we have never been frozen or fried out of existence. Like a cork bobbing on the waves above and below an imaginary horizontal line, Earth temperatures respond to natural events. This is called a steady-state equilibrium. But are "man-made" factors presently changing the horizontality of that temperature line from steady-state equilibrium to one which points upward(dynamic equilibrium)? At worst, the answer is inconclusive. Further, all steady-state systems (including Earth) have recovery tools (like the human body's arsenal for bringing fever/chill conditions back to its set temperature). Regulators of course must be preserved and protected. But as for "man-made CO2", its effect seems dwarfed by the potency and sheer volume of nature's heavyweights - the mighty oceans for example, a powerful heat buffer (damper). Even though temperatures between 1950 and 1980 declined several times, carbon dioxide concentrations continued to rise in that period while temperatures dropped. Remember in 1975 we are on the edge of an ice age.
So, the recent hysteria is, at best, a politically correct ration of nonsense.
Dr. Mark Harris is an educator Environmental Geochemist, Northern Caribbean University , a degreed geographer and geologist and holds a doctorate in Environmental Geochemistry. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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