I enjoyed this letter to the editor from this morning’s National Post/Financial Post (not available online I’m afraid).
Re: Climate action would be suicidal, Peter Foster, Jan. 9
[Good article – here’s a link]As a geologist who is well-acquainted with the long and fascinating history of the Earth, I find the obsession with catastrophic environmentalism — in this instance so-called global warming, mind boggling, and from a scientific perspective, shameful.
I’ve seen countless geology-department professors bury their integrity as they morph from respectable paleontologists or geologists from other specialties, to “climate change” experts, then watch the research funding roll in. Catastrophism as a scientific phenomenon was quite popular until just before the time of Charles Darwin when it was thoroughly demolished by, among other things, the brilliant work of Sir Charles Lyell, whose seminal work Principles of Geology helped properly consign catastrophism to the ash dump of what we now refer to as junk science.
There is no evidence for a single globalscale catastrophe in earth’s five- to six-billion-year history (no, the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction event supposedly caused by some kind of ridiculously massive meteorite impact was nothing of the sort: in the first place, there is no evidence for any giant meteorite impact; second, some reptiles — a.k.a. dinosaurs — survived, along with virtually all of the mammals, fish and the vast majority of the plant kingdom. What kind of mass extinction is that?).
Second, the most significant so-called greenhouse gas is not carbon dioxide at all: it’s water vapour. And what is almost 70% of the earth covered by? Yes, water! Care to guess what percent of the surface of the earth is covered by matter that is continuously emanating carbon dioxide? Probably somewhere under 15%.
Of course, add ocean currents and their deep-seated, cyclical and poorly understood mechanism into the mix, the irregular solar flux, the wobbly orbit of the earth around the sun, periodicepisodes of widespread volcanic activity (Krakotoa emplaced the industrial equivalent of decades worth of ash and other pollutants into the atmosphere in less than two days), the carbon flux in the oceans, and numerous other factors into the mix, well, then you start to get a more realisticpic ture of what’s involved in controlling climate variation.
Also, for your information, there was a fascinating paper that appeared in the Geological Association of Canada journal, last year I think, demonstrating that increases in atmosphericc arbon dioxide appear to follow increases in temperature, not precede them! I doubt you’ ll hear the great wizard, Dr. David Suzuki, catastrophist extraordinaire, speaking much about that.
Finally, as if any other proofs of the earth’s incredible self-buffering and self-regulating capacity were required, how about the fact that as this winter has been so mild, the burning of fossil fuels for heating as gone way down and so has the consequent emissions of carbon dioxide. Presto. Problem solved! Peter Foster hits the nail on the head when he suggests that it would be “a travesty” for the Harper government to go down for perceived inaction on Canada’s part in supposed man-made climate change.
Realizing that concept themselves and as a party wishing to stay in office, the Conservatives are now willing to hold their collective noses and trot out billions of dollars of our surplus tax dollars in initiatives to aid those misguided publicperc eptions. As they must feel the rest of their agenda is not woth toileting over such a frivolous subject, we can not fault them for pulling the old Liberal “expediency” trick.
Avrom Howard, Thornhill, Ont.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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