Global Climate Change Understood
The issue of Global Climate Change is often misunderstood. A better understanding to the phenomena may
bring some long over-due sanity to the discussion.
In the geologic history of the
Earth, we are in a time of the coldest 10 percent of the climate. In other
words, 90 percent of our Earth’s history was too warm to have ice at either
pole.
If you go back to the Roman warming periods during the time that Jesus Christ
walked the Earth we are actually now cooler than we were then. So we’ve cooled
since the time Jesus Christ walked the Earth. We’re actually about the same
temperature or cooler since the medieval warm period, since about 900 to 1300.
Thermometer data comes online around 1850, right at the end of the Little Ice
Age. All these things you hear about the
glaciers retreating, most of that glacier retreat happened by 1900.
Now, 80 percent of the carbon dioxide came after 1940, or after World War II in
1945. We had a huge warm spell from the 1920s into the ’30s and then, we had a
cooling period from the ’50s all the way up to about the late 1970s.
The National Academy of Sciences, the CIA, and some of the same scientists
warning of global cooling in the ’70s, then flipped and became global warming
proponents.
I remember warnings of the coming Ice Age when I was in elementary school in
the late 1950s.
There are many factors affecting GCC (Global Climate Change).
The most talked about contributing factor is the amount of Carbon Dioxide in
the atmosphere. Atmospheric CO2 is
a byproduct of the use of fossil fuels, but also is released into the
atmosphere in huge amounts by volcanic activity and, to a lesser degree, by
continental drift.
Solar activity such as Sun Spots, Flares and UVB levels are also contributing
factors.
Slow changes in the Earth’s orbit and slight changes in the tilt of Earth’s
axis will affect GCC as well.
Atmospheric composition and reflectivity as well as surface reflectivity are
also factors that affect GCC.
Why then is Atmospheric CO2 the only factor in the discussion. The answer is simply because we have been
lead to believe that by controlling anthropomorphic CO2 emissions we
can control the Earth’s climate. This is
a vast over simplification but, if accepted, it can be used as a very strong
political tool.
Political action (legislation) is needed to control the use of fossil fuels so we
can control the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Since there are also natural CO2
generators, this is pure folly. Further,
as mentioned above, Atmospheric CO2 is only one factor involved in
Global Climate Change, so controlling anthropomorphic (man-made) CO2
emissions would do little at all to control Global Climate Change.
So what can we do? Global Climate Change
will continue no matter what we do, so we can, and must, adapt our actions and
way of life to meet whatever changes it brings on, just like our ancestors have
been doing for as long as Humanity has been on this Earth.