@kaydee50 wrote:
I find it hard to believe that with almost 8 billion???? (not sure of the exact number) people on earth, humans do not have an effect on climate. While the climate has changed over the millennia, surely we are contributing to that change and not for the better??
Do we affect temperature? Yes. We're all 98.6 degree (give or take a bit) radiators radiating heat out into the atmosphere. We live and work in heated and cooled structures. (Don't forget air conditioning simply takes the heat from inside our structures and moves it outside.) Anyone saying we don't affect temperature is a fool. Do we affect climate? That's where things get a bit trickier. There are a whole lot of things that affect climate, but surface temperature (what we contribute through normal living) isn't so much one of them. It's a really big, big planet and we're tiny little specks on it.
You may have noticed this big yellowish ball in the sky. It's called the sun. Its output tends to vary a bit and that tends to have rather dramatic effects on our climate. Of late, it's been in a cooler cycle. Some will tell you that indicates a new ice age is pending. Are they right? Who knows. We'll find out at some point in the future.
The alarmists point to CO2 as the big issue. Eh, maybe, maybe not. Carbon dioxide is oddly enough heavier than air. Now air currents tend to prevent the stratification you see in liquids or in a sealed container, but higher CO2 levels near the ground are great for plants. In fact, many commercial greenhouses pump in CO2. The "CO2 is going to kill us all!" alarmists would be a lot easier to believe if they were targeting all sources of CO2 and not just fossil fuels and cattle.
There are very simple, small changes that could be done at little to no cost that would drastically reduce the amount of CO2 produced. Every bottle of soda you open releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Do we truly need carbonated beverages? That industry alone contributes a whole lot of CO2. The greenhouse industry uses a lot of CO2. Bakeries and breweries churn out tons of CO2.
Small gasoline engines like those used for lawn equipment pollute vastly more than modern automobiles. When was the last time you heard someone say they should be banned and replaced with electric and rechargeable options. (That are readily available and I've used most of my life.) The fact that the alarmists ignore many sources of CO2 that are easy to end, tends to make me doubt their credibility.
Alarmists look at surface temperatures and say, "The temperatures are rising! It's definitely CO2! We know the levels have never been this high because we've measured the levels of CO2 in air trapped in sea ice all the way back eight hundred thousand years and those levels are lower!" That kind of ignores the fact there are sea ice algae that live in and move through, oddly enough, sea ice. Like all algae, sea ice algae consumes CO2 and exhales oxygen. The only way you can trust those readings is by ignoring the existence of sea ice algae.
What else could account for the rise in temperature? In this country we're now consuming three times the BTU's we were in the 1950's. Here's a simple experiment. Go out and set up for four equally spaced small campfires in a circle with a radius of say six feet. I'd recommend using the manmade logs to limit variability. Set up a thermometer in the middle and record the ambient temperature, then light one campfire and record the temp as the fire burns until the temp returns to ambient. Then light the other three fires all at once. Guess what? When you consume three times the BTU's the temperature goes up higher. Shocking! Well, not really. Did the atmosphere far above the three campfires suddenly become more heat-reflective and that's why temps went up? No. You just consumed three times the BTU's. We're consuming three times the BTU's we were in the fifties. Of course surface temps are going to rise. If they weren't rising we'd have a much bigger problem.
The reality is everyone just needs to chill out, take a deep breath and relax. The world isn't ending tomorrow. We've had roughly twenty tipping points so far that have all proved to be lies. There are reasonable and rational answers for everything we're seeing these days. Nothing is irreversible. I tend to trust Mother Nature, God, whoever to keep things in balance. If CO2 is the problem then warmer temps mean longer growing seasons which means plants consume more CO2 and we need less heat to heat our homes which lowers fossil fuel consumption which reduces CO2 production which lowers the levels of CO2 and thus lowers the temperature. But, we don't even know for sure that CO2 is the problem.
There are always people out there who want to believe the world is ending and the rest of us are fools for not believing them. This belief has gone on as long as there have been humans on the planet. The reality is the world has never ended and probably won't in any of our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children or their children and it won't be because of anything we did or didn't do. We're tiny little specks on this big old planet and we're not nearly as important or impactful as many seem to think we are.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
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