Global Climate Change

This was written last year, but never published.

Global Climate Change


There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.

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There’s more, but I think you get the picture.  This is the first part of a 1975 Newsweek article about our catastrophic descent into a new Ice Age.  Humans burning fossil fuels are also blamed as a large contributing factor.

To be fair, it seems there wasn’t wide spread acceptance of these theories in the scientific community.  Perhaps peer review was better tolerated in 1975.

And they wonder why there are so many skeptics.  The ’75 article is little different from those thirty-four years later.  Gloom and doom sells better than rational, unbiased, coherent news.

To read the complete Newsweek article, search for "denis dutton global cooling," then choose the Newsweek url.  Otherwise you will likely wind up at the wrong site.

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Is the Earth warming?  I am not privy to the data, which would allow me to make an independent decision, but my inclination is to believe, after reading many points of view, that yes, it is.  Does human activity contribute to environmental change?  In that any one thing is in some way connected to all other things, then, yes, we either add to or subtract from a base, which, in this case, includes human beings.  Everyone reading to this point has contributed to the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.

The Earth has gone through numerous heating and cooling cycles.  From what I’ve read, the natural inclination is for Earth to be in a warming cycle.  If that is indeed the case, what do we do about it?  Do we want to tax the peoples of the planet to the point of turning all of us into wards of the state for, at best, a minimal slowing of Earth’s future environment?  Or do we move forward, planning for the inevitable future, changing those things that are within our power to change.

All the speeches, all the rhetoric will have no effect on the planet.  What comes, in the way of poorly thought out and enforced legislation, will have a devastating impact on this country.  It’s time for a little rational thinking.  It’s time to quit looking at bribery in the legislature as simply a way of doing business.  It’s time to ask just what are these peoples’ agenda?  Are we prepared for phantom companies selling phantom carbon credits to legitimate companies?  Who would pay for this?  One guess is all you need.

The Climate Change Summit, or whatever they are calling it, in Copenhagen will end in chaos.  Nothing will be settled.  Nothing accomplished.  But that won’t end it for the United States.  As long as we allow a mindless congress and irrational president to stay in office we remain at the mercy of our government.  I don’t know about you, but a fundamental change in our democracy doesn’t actually sound like a good thing to me.  Make no mistake; climate change legislation is not about fixing the climate.  It is about redistributing wealth.