Sound Off is a public forum. Articles are selected from letters to the editor or may be written specifically for this feature. Today, Port Orchard resident Karl Duff argues that Washington state lawmakers’ catering to environmentalist wishes contradicts recent scientific results about global warming.
Consider what our panicked and unwise lawmakers have done. They have passed Draconian legislation rationing and taxing nearly all energy to stop climate change.
The same extremists who have previously successfully suppressed nuclear and hydroelectric energy have now also placed fossel fuels into worse bondage — nearly 98 percent of our supply of energy has now been placed outside the bounds of normal market forces, development and use.
The Washington state legislation now imposes a requirement for CO2 emissions to be reduced to 50 percent of their 1990 levels by 2050.
The enviros are having a field day. Meanwhile, the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) is even plotting the solution to obesity through these policies.
People are publishing editorials to dedicate their lives to reducing CO2.
As the Evergreen Freedom Foundation has stated, we are facing a totalitarian “recipe for catastrophe.”
Yet consider the most recent actual scientific findings and developments.
• So called “global warming” is now being redefined as “climate change,” probably because global temperatures have actually been dropping since 2006. Worldwide, they dropped by .7 degrees Centigrade (about 1.3 degrees F) in 2007 and appear to be doing the same in 2008.
The reason for this is because of decreased sunspot cycle amplitude, cycle length, and other factors. (CO2 levels, however, have not decreased.)
• It is true that earth has been warming, but not necessarily due to carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. In fact, glacial melting (average of 169 glaciers) and has been in progress since 1810 — about 100 years prior to the vast increase in metric tonnage of carbon usage now wrongfully asserted to be the culprit for climate change.
• We’ve been brainwashed to believe that carbon dioxide drives “greenhouse effect,” which drives climate change. But this turns out not to be true. Water vapor has drastically greater influence than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, while CO2 impact is negligible.
• The six-fold increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1940 has had no influence on global temperature rates. In the 1970s you may recall, there was concern over global cooling and coming of another Ice Age, even while CO2 emissions were rapidly increasing.
This cooling was the result of 10 years of reduced solar activity during that decade. (The younger generation knows none of this, of course.)
Since 1940, this six-fold CO2 increase has also had no effect in the melt rate of glaciers or sea level increase.
Variations are slight and all are due to variations in solar activity.
• As water increases in temperature, so does “outgassing” of CO2 from ocean water. Ocean temperatures have increased about .5 degrees C over the past 100 years with the increasing solar activity, further contributing to atmospheric CO2 (not the other way round.)
• Continuing long-term changes of global temperature since 1900 correlate almost precisely with the change in solar activity (a .21 percent increase in temperature versus .19 percent increase in solar activity).
• Further, the short-term (year-to-year) variations in Arctic air temperature correlate almost precisely with solar activity. U.S. surface temperatures also correlate in the same manner.
We really have too little to do with our free time. While the rest of us have been playing or sleeping, we’ve given things over to the environmental social engineers stroking their latest idealogy.
Thus, in addition to foolish and fruitless legislation, efforts are now underway to list the polar bear as an endangered species.
No one seems to wonder what happened to polar bears during the medieval period of global warming (950 to 1350 A.D.), when Greenland was colonized and pastures of livestock and surrounding open oceans abounded.
We’ve all been brainwashed. Even National Geographic has been confused.
A close inspection of its 2007 treatment of the subject shows that increases in CO2 concentration over the past several thousand years do not correlate at all with its data on global temperature during the same time.
Anyone who doubts these assertions and is interested in what science is really saying should take a look at the compiled supporting science in the paper, “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” by Robinson, Robinson and Soon, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (2007) 12, 79-90.
The authors have been at this business for more than a decade and their paper includes 132 published science references.
Now if everything’s OK, let’s just all just go back to sleep and let the lawmakers continue in their own cruise control.
Right? Wrong.
I hope readers agree we need responsible people rather than lemmings in the state legislature — people who will also do their homework rather than blindly follow the whims of environmental extremism.
