Global Warming or Solar Warming?
I wrote an essay on this topic six years ago entitled “If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Don’t Blame Global Warming.” In this paper published by the Independence Institute, I warned that wild assumptions were fueling the theory that human energy consumption was causing measured but slight increases in the Earth’s average atmospheric temperature.
The worst wild assumption, I argued, is “that the modern Earth is a steady state, unchanging planet receiving a constant, invariable amount of heat from the sun.”
The Earth has been warming since the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age about 18,000 years ago, and there’s nothing to indicate that 130 years of Industrial Man has accelerated the warming trend. In fact, geocraft.com says we’re more likely to start experiencing a cooling trend leading to another Ice Age in about 2,000 to 10,000 years.
As recently as 1715, Europe was experiencing a mini-Ice Age caused by a decrease in sunspots and total solar output. Peaking between 1645 and 1715, the Maunder Minimum caused glaciers to move southward, rivers to freeze more frequently and longer, and many reported crop failures.
Gary Rottman, a senior research associate at the Boulder-based Laboratory for Atmospheric Science and Physics, speculated in 2000 that the sun’s visible spectrum output may have decreased by only .03 percent during the Maunder Minimum, but that was enough to cause dramatic climate change on Earth.
The sun’s measurable output has increased by .01 percent since accurate measurements began in 1978, Rottman said.
According to one research organization, the warming trend on Earth ended in 1998. The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reports that for the years 1998-2005, the global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
So what’s all the fuss really about? A measurable increase in the Earth’s average atmospheric temperature of .4 to .8 degrees Centigrade was observed between 1978 and 1998, relying on satellite measurements.
But, according to space.com, Mars also appears to be coming out of an Ice Age and is slowly warming. Now, there aren’t any humans or industry on Mars, so it’s going to be pretty hard to blame humans for Mars’ apparently shrinking polar ice caps.
And that’s the point. Planets change, even when there is no life at all on them. Sheets of ice form and recede; continents shift; ice caps grow and shrink; oceans grow and recede; atmospheric temperatures range from tropical to Ice Age. And all of these things occurred on Earth long before man evolved or industry began.
Scientists who are more environmentalists than objective researchers claim their computer models give them the godlike power to separate and discern natural climate change from “anthropogenic,” or human-caused, climate change. I say hogwash. There’s no computer model complex enough to take into account all factors that make up Earth’s biosphere.
OK, let’s say you’re still not convinced and you want to do something to make sure the Earth does not become unbearably hot. Rather than agitating for laws, regulations and treaties like the Kyoto Accord, there is something much more effective you can do to reduce fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions: become a vegetarian, or at least stop eating red meat.
Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, assistant professors of geophysics at the University of Chicago, conducted a study showing the vegetarian diet to be the most energy efficient, and therefore non-polluting, followed by a generally omnivorous American-style diet emphasizing poultry and fish, reported ABC News in April.
Besides that, cows and pigs are flatulent. They produce methane. Who’s to say that global warming, if it’s not natural, isn’t caused by methane-producing bovines and porcines, raised in huge numbers planet-wide by humans?
