Global warming? Get over it!

I’m not a believer in all this “global warming” mania. People focus on the last hundred years or so and act like Chicken Little, crying that the sky is falling. What they’re failing to understand is that there have been periods of alternate warming and cooling throughout the earth’s history, LONG before humans were making fire and polluting the atmosphere with their carbon emissions.

[Edit: It's not that I think humans are totally blameless in this. Being a good steward of our environment makes good sense. It's the over-reaction and politicizing of the "green" thing that I object to.]

According to an item on the Discovery Channel website, here is a brief history of the earth: About four billion years ago, the earth was hot (the “primordial soup”, as some call it). Then about 34 million years ago, the earth cooled and glaciers formed. Ever since, we’ve had  a roughly 100,000-year Ice Age cycle, driven by the earth’s rotational tilt and the shape of its orbit around the sun. Did we humans have anything to do with that? I don’t think so — modern humans didn’t appear on the scene until perhaps 70,000 years ago.

The last Ice Age began some 21,000 years ago, perhaps triggered by the eruption of Mt. Toba in Indonesia, which spewed out roughly 2,800 times the volume of ash and fumes as the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. I remember our local meteorologist saying some years later that the weather has been messed up since the Mt. St. Helens eruption. If that event can screw up the weather (which is an element of the overall climate) for years afterwards, then how much more would Mt. Toba’s eruption change the climate? 

And what happened to the last Ice Age? It ended about 10,000 years ago. I’d say that the melting of the huge glaciers that covered a majority of the earth during the Ice Age would definitely be categorized as “global warming”. Did humans have a part in that? Again — no. There was no Industrial Revolution going on at that time to blame it on, and the puny campfires of a few million Homo sapiens couldn’t possibly produce enough carbon dioxide to pollute the atmosphere to the degree necessary to cause a global climate change.

And what about the hole in the ozone layer that everyone was so worried about in the mid-1980s? You never hear about that anymore. I suppose it’s gone out of fashion now, with the new cry of “global warming” being the popular phrase nowadays.

My position is that the planet isn’t nearly as fragile as we think, and that it’s very arrogant of us to presume that we humans have enough power to influence the earth’s cyclical climate changes. Those changes were happening long before we got here, and they’ll continue to go on long after we’re gone. Just because the cycle is 100,000 years long, and we happen to be on the warming swing of that cycle now, doesn’t mean that we caused it.

I think the main impact that “global warming” is going to have on our present condition is that it will cause economic havoc. New rules, restrictions and edicts have (and will continue to) come down from governmental sources to regulate carbon emissions and penalize businesses if they don’t adhere to those strict guidelines. It will affect consumers both psychologically (one more thing to worry about, guilt if they don’t do their part) and economically (increased costs passed on from companies affected by new regulations).

Consumers are already constantly bombarded with the “green” message from the media, activist groups and governmental agencies, and I’m sure it will continue to be in the forefront of the news for years to come. It’s the current “hot topic” — pun intended.

Get over yourselves, people, and “chill out”!

Tags: environment, science, society