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Global warming is being used as a partisan political club for beating up on conservatives.  I believe in global warming.  I also believe in global cooling.  Since we are about 150 years from the last cooling period called the Little Ice Age it is no wonder that glaciers are retreating.  The history of the earth’s climate is represented by lots of spikes in temperature.  Within the large scale cycles there are smaller cycles severe enough to have affected populated areas of the earth in the last several thousand years.  Warmer weather leads to more surface water and more snow and ice.  Water, snow, and ice leads to global cooling.  During the Climatic Optimum seven thousand years ago when conditions were warmer and wetter than today CO2 levels were little more than half of what they are today.  Since then we have had global cooling that maxed out at between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago and again from a little before to a little after three thousand years ago, with a significant warming spell in between.  Changes in the Gulf Stream are blamed on these 1,500 year cycles.

 More recently the little ice age running from about 1400A.D. to about 1850 A.D. had serious effects on human centers of civilization.  Viking activity in Greenland and Iceland was seriously affected in the mid 1300s leading to eventual withdrawal from those areas.  We are only 150 or so years out of the Little Ice Age so it is no wonder that we see evidence of glacier retreat.  A natural result of the warming that marked the end of the little ice age is not only the retreat of some glaciers, but also an increase of snow fall in some places such as the polar areas.  As natural and expected as it should be the retreating of glaciers is announced with great wonder, awe, and fear with little publicity for the extra snowfall.

 

Contrary to what the global warming alarmists are saying, the debate is far from over as to whether or not CO2 is responsible for it.  A few months ago I purchased five new books on the environment and read them and took notes on them.  You need to know that there is disagreement in the scientific community as to whether the increase in CO2 levels follows or precedes climate change.  One Kyoto Protocol advocate proclaimed that since life was established on earth the intensity of the sun’s rays have increased by 30% while surface temperatures on our planet have remained fairly constant.  There are reasons for that and reading half a dozen books failed to give answers to my satisfaction.  There appears to me to be an effort to ignore the mechanisms which moderate climate, perhaps because they don’t fully understand them.

 

Water in its various forms is a key factor for the many reasons that the earth has the ability to provide an environment suitable for carbon based life.  The latent heat of fusion and transformation was more often ignored than mentioned and then not in detail and often as not, inaccurately.  The latent heat of transformation or fusion comes into play during a change of state.  When H2O molecules have a change of state the need to transfer energy or accept energy arises.  H2O must obey the laws of temperature and pressure.  Being under considerably less pressure as vapor and less densely packed than in the liquid state, the water molecules immediately attain a lower temperature when they evaporate.  Thus H2O serves as a temperature moderator resisting warming and cooling.  The small droplets which form clouds have a cooling effect in the day time as they reflect sunlight back into space.  At night clouds  prevent some of the infrared heat from escaping into space thus limiting night time cooling.  A couple of the books acknowledged that water vapor is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than is CO2, but they did not say how much greater.  One or two of the books reported that water vapor retains about two thirds of the heat trapped by greenhouse gasses.    Since water only reflects 5 - 10% of the sunlight when the sun is directly overhead, the amount of heat retained by our oceans must be hugely greater than the heat trapped by carbon dioxide and all the greenhouse gasses combined, but I’m only guessing because the promoters of the Kyoto Protocol don’t give us all the pertinent facts.  One of the authors actually admitted that the effects of H2O were an enigma because of the complexity of it’s contributions to climate.

 

One book mentioned an experiment relating to the quantum connection to global warming.   CO2 was added without a resulting rise in temperature, but no details were given.  Greenhouse gasses cannot trap more energy than is radiated, so for any given amount of radiation there is a maximum concentration beyond which any added greenhouse gas will not result in an increase in trapped heat.  Each type of greenhouse gas traps a different range of the infrared spectrum as each gas needs a different quantum packet of infra red energy to absorb or release in order to affect the electron orbital shift associated with a change in energy.  The greenhouse gasses, like other gasses in the lower atmosphere are not affected by the sun’s rays.  The sun’s rays heat up things on the surface which give off infra red radiation.  The gasses which trap infrared energy are called greenhouse gasses.  The infrared radiation warms up the greenhouse gasses which also increases their kinetic energy allowing them to warm up the other gasses through their vibrations.  Orbital shifts of the electrons are not stable so the greenhouse gasses give off infra red energy warming up things around them or the infrared energy leaves our atmosphere as orbits degrade.  But, how cold does it have to get before CO2 has only kinetic energy to share?

 

When you consider the difference in temperatures between western U.S. desert areas and areas to the east with high humidity, you have high temperatures from 110 to 125 plus in the former and eighty to 100 degrees in the latter.  Even with water vapor as a much more potent greenhouse gas the areas of high humidity are actually about thirty degrees cooler than the arid areas because the lush vegetation radiates much less infrared energy than do desert areas.  Assume the temperature to be 113 degrees with ten percent relative humidity in an arid area.  That would place the actual percentage of water vapor in the air at slightly over one percent which calculates to 100 parts per 10,000 while CO2 is only about 3 parts per 10,000.  Add to that the fact that water vapor is much more effective at trapping energy than is CO2 then guess which greenhouse gas is the most responsible for high temperatures in arid areas.  If relative humidity was only one percent and actual water vapor in the atmosphere was about .12 percent then CO2 would be at one fourth the concentration of the water vapor.  

 

The  Kyoto Protocol advocates are not telling us at what concentration adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will not result in the trapping of more heat.  They are blaming increased CO2 levels for a .5 to 1.0 degree F increase in temperature during the latter part of the 20th century and predicting about 3.6 degree F increase in temperature by 2100.  That increase has been in temperature lows.  

Wind and ocean currents, and variations in solar radiation create the cycles in climate.  Some of the differences in solar radiation are the result of sun spot activity, and some are the result of changes in the earth’s orbit and axis in cycles that change slowly over many thousands of years.  In the very short term there are 11 year cycles in sun spot activity which can affect climate.  CO2 can increase the trapping of infrared heat and aerosols (dust and certain smoke stack emissions) can reflect solar radiation back into space causing global dimming, but they cannot guarantee what changes will come to the wind and ocean currents which actually bring about severe changes in climate.

 

Environmentalists can look at the past and see patterns, but those patterns do not translate into certainty about future patterns or what will trigger them when they do come. Judging by the last 100,000 years are we at the end of a 10,000 year warming period, or near the end of a 12,000 year warming period?  On the other hand if we look back 400,000 years are we 10,000 years into a 25,000 year warming period?  And what about unpredictable events?  When our solar system inters a region of space with more space dust will the dust cause our sun to shine brighter or will the dust interfere with the solar radiation reaching the earth?  What about volcanic activity or a hit by a large meteor or a comet?  There is too much uncertainty surrounding changes in climate to allow that fear to be a reason for destroying our economy by adopting the Kyoto Protocol.

 

Evidence is only now coming to light suggesting that methane is given off in significant quantities by living plants.  Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide this has serious implications for the promoters of the Kyoto Protocol.  Will they want us to cut down all the rain forests?  Environmentalists are also concerned about soil depletion.  Perhaps the alternating cycles of global warming and ice ages are meant to bring about environmental renewal.  If so, perhaps we should accept the inevitable global warming knowing it will bring about another cooling period, or perhaps a little ice age if not a large one.  On the other hand, we may on the verge of the extreme heat and red tides forecast as part of the great destructions prior to the second coming of the Lord.  The puny hand of man will not thwart God’s purposes.

 

Speaking personally as one who considers himself a Christian, I prefer to think that God can influence the weather so we ought to be concerned about pleasing Him.  God prepared the earth for our occupancy so we ought to be grateful and use our natural resources wisely instead of recklessly on the one hand or on the other hand foolishly trying to maintain everything in its current state as though it can stay that way forever.  Folks whose homes can be threatened by forest fires know all too well how much more dangerous such fires are when environmentalists insist that woodlands be left alone to become too overgrown with brush and trees growing too densely.  How many millions have died in Africa alone because DDT was banned allowing the proliferation of insects to bring disease and death?