Have you ever been warned against tripping over a false premise and tumbling to an erroneous conclusion?
How about Chicken Little, or the Emperor with no clothes?
It seems we’ve allowed ourselves to be tripped up by politicized scientists of perhaps questionable integrity and led to an inappropriate ‘solution’ to an artificial problem.
Let me clarify. For about 30 years now, we’ve been hearing that our climate – and general well-being – are threatened by discharge of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere resulting in global warming with dire consequences for food production and sea levels.
This warning, from a cadre of climate scientists, environmentalists and others who have told their story often and acquired the aura of a widely-accepted ‘truth,’ an article of faith not to be questioned.
Science, however, does not support the doom-and-gloom prophecies.
Climate has been changing for eons with longish cold periods – ice ages – separated by shorter warm spells. Today’s warm period, the Holocene, began about 12,000 years ago, long before mankind’s activities began to send into the atmosphere the CO2 emissions which allegedly cause global warming.
During the more recent past, the earth has experienced the Roman warm period (200 BC to 600 AD) and the Medieval warm (800 to 1350 AD) both preceding the Industrial Revolution, which is asserted to be the beginning of a catastrophic rise in atmospheric CO2.
If man-generated CO2 could obviously not have triggered these warm interglacials, what did? Small changes in the earth’s relation to the sun – the 100,000-year cycle of the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun, the 41,000-year tilt cycle of the earth’s axis and the 23,000-year precession cycle – are the most plausible causes.
When these factors act together to produce cool summers, with consequent reduced glacier melting, a glaciation phase begins and, when they combine to produce warm summers, an interglacial is started.
Evidence from the past shows CO2 concentrations much higher than those being experienced now. Also at times, when CO2 levels were much higher than today’s, global temperatures fell, and at other times, low CO2 levels coincided with relatively high temperatures, showing that temperature and CO2 are not directly correlated.
Mankind’s annual contribution to atmospheric CO2 is less than five per cent, the other 95 per cent coming from natural factors.
Despite this data, forecasts of warming blamed on CO2 emissions have persuaded politicians that a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade imposition is necessary. If implemented, the Kyoto accord, and now Durban, could cost our economy billions and reduce global temperature by only 0.08 per cent.
Environment Canada estimated in 2007 that reducing 1990 CO2 emissions by six per cent would eliminate 275,000 jobs, raise electricity and gas prices 50 per cent and cost families $4,000 each year.
It seems we’ve been expensively misled.
Dr. Roy Strang writes monthly on the environment for the Peace Arch News. rmstrang@shaw.ca