CLIMATE CHANGE: IS THE SKY FALLING?

Last week, the United States Senate held an all-nighter to call attention to the threat of climate change. You don’t have to convince me that the climate is changing. I watch the National Geographic and Discovery channels a lot and I have learned that climate change is natural. It’s been going on for millions of years. In fact, starting back about two million years ago, the climate of the Earth repeatedly shifted back and forth between very cold periods to very warm periods. During the cold periods, glaciers covered much of the world. And during the warm periods (global warming), much of the ice melted, presumably submerging much of the low-lying land around the world. There weren’t any civilizations back then, but if there had been, it is possible that, during one of the warm periods, a reporter in Chicago may have written, “Scientists are predicting that the climate is changing and that Chicago will be completely destroyed by a glacier within the next century. Congress is continuing to debate the passage of laws to try to prevent the climate from changing. But the good news is that the scientists are also predicting that we’ll get five great lakes out of this.”

Even after the last Ice Age, there is all kinds of evidence that the climate changed many times. For example, the bones of many dinosaurs have been found buried in deserts. Dinosaurs could not have survived in a desert so scientists have concluded that the climate in those locales was once tropical or near-tropical. The Sphinx shows both wind and rain erosion. But it hardly ever rains in the desert where the Spinx is located. So it is reasonable to believe that the climate has changed in Egypt during the 4000 years (or more) since the Sphinx was sculpted. Death Valley was once an ocean. Go figure.

What makes today’s predicted climate change different, however, is that it is alleged that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases may be causing the change. I have to admit that I had to research what the heck greenhouse gasses are and why they are important. Greenhouse gasses are natural in the atmosphere of the planet and are generally considered a good thing because, without them, Earth would be much colder than it is now. In other words, these gasses create a “greenhouse” effect. These gasses include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide (also called laughing gas) and ozone. But there is a problem, some scientists say. For the past couple of centuries, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, mankind has been pumping an increasing amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, increasingly upsetting the mix of greenhouse gasses– and, they say, this is causing the Earth to get warmer– which, in the years to come, could negatively affect most ecosystems as well as the livelihood of billions of people around the world. According to those making this prediction, warmer temperatures will melt much of the polar ice which could increase sea level by three feet or more within the next century– which would put the Florida Keys under water. Needless to say, those who sell real estate here don’t want to hear that. If that gets out, it could put a real crimp in sales.

If you have been paying attention to the news, you probably know that there are a whole bunch of scientists and others on the other side of this issue who think that the sky-is-falling theories of the global warming alarmists are pure bunk. John Coleman, who founded the Weather Channel, has called those theories “the greatest scam in human history.” A recent article in American Thinker magazine suggested that “Global warming became a cause to save life on Earth before it had a chance to become good science.” The article went on to to point out that, while “everybody knows” that the Earth is warming and that is, apparently, a bad thing, “the public has no idea of the number of scientists– precisely 1000 at last count of a congessional committee– who believe that global warming is benign and natural– and that it ended in 1988.” In the May 2012 issue of Forbes magazine, one of the featured stories was headlined “Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, the Earth is Cooling.” The take-away from this article was this: “Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.”

So, whether or not you believe that the Florida Keys are going to be underwater within the next 100 years depends on who you’re listening to. But I have to tell you that my problem with the whole debate is that — even assuming that the alarmists are right– I think it is highly unlikely that they can do anything to stop the world’s climate from changing. Of course, they can always hope that advances in technology, changing consumer and business practices, and more policies and laws to reduce fossil fuel emissions might at least help to SLOW DOWN climate change. Good luck with that. But you never can tell. Maybe within a few years, NASA will be able to send a large fleet of robot spaceships out to vacuum up the excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere– or something like that.

But even after Harry Reid’s Senate spent all night talking about climate change last week, they did not produce any specific plans to try to stop or even slow down climate change. The problem here is that, while lawmakers like to wring their hands and talk about the possibility of catastrophic climate change, they hesitate to pass into law potentially crippling restrictions on the emissions of greenhouse gasses if other major countries in the world are not willing to do the same thing. After all, the so-called climate change crisis is a world-wide problem, isn’t it? You may have heard of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This was considered to be a paradigm-changing agreement concerning climate change and restriction of greenhouse emissions. But it has turned out to be less than feckless. A 2010 report by the London School of Economics concluded that the Protocol “has failed to produce any discernible real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gasses.” Maybe that’s because two of the biggest polluters in the world– China and India– were not required to reduce or even limit emissions.

This does not mean that we all should not continue to do our part to reduce all kinds of pollution. But we should be doing it for the right reasons. Also, especially here in the Keys, officials should be developing a plan– JUST IN CASE sea level starts rising here in the near future. You may or may not be aware that a climate change advisory committee has been appointed here and has been meeting for months to develop recommendations for how County officials might cope with climate change.

There are a number of reasons why climate change activists might be frustrated, at least for the moment. Not the least of those reasons is that they have not been able to get the majority of the American people excited about the issue. A recent Gallop Poll suggests that climate change is not something that tops Americans’ list of concerns. In the poll, climate change ranked close to the bottom– number 14– on a list of 15 national concerns.

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Dennis Reeves Cooper, Ph.D

Dennis Reeves Cooper founded Key West The Newspaper (The Blue Paper) in 1994 and was the editor and publisher until he retired in 2012.