Is It Just Me, Or Is It Getting Hotter In Here? (Part Two)

When reviewing some of the posts I've made, I realized I've actually mentioned this one before but it bears repeating because it's getting more and more obvious it's happening: Global Warming.

Everyone has an opinion about it and most of those opinions are wrong mostly because of self-imposed ignorance. If you want to be enlightened, read on. If not, well, Ron White was right: You can't fix stupid.

Trying to explain Global Warming's nuances is like trying to explain covalent bonds to a first grader. It can be done, but you need some background first and we need to use small words.

The background:

First of all, let's talk about what global warming means. It means a change in the climate so that things get warmer overall. There is also a difference between weather and climate. The short version is that climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

Weather is the day to day stuff you encounter. Heat waves, cold fronts, storms, rain, snow, sleet, fog, etc. It's what you look for in a weatherman's forecast. When you ask "how hot is it?", you're asking about the weather. A day's weather usually has little to do with the climate of a place since it has more differences than what one would expect from the climate of a place. If you go to the desert and have it rain on you (As happens everywhere at some time), you don't think the climate of the desert is changing. It was just a freak weather pattern.

In defining a climate, there are two major ways of doing this. The first is to record the weather over a long period of time and average it over the years. The second is to try to figure out what the climate was like from things like ice layers, tree-rings and soil samples. We've gotten rather good at this, so we have a pretty good picture of what the climate was and is. What we are less clear about is what all the things that can effect it are and exactly what kind of effect those things may have on the climate.

In taking the two together, any one place, on average, has a certain kind of weather which, on any given day, may not be what the "average weather pattern" (which is to say the climate) would normally be. One can use the two ways of figuring out what the climate of a place was to see how that climate has or hasn't changed over a long period of time. It takes a lot of changes in weather to make a small change a climate.

Another thing to keep in mind is that science doesn't usually have certain answers. It has theories which are what we think is going on or how something works. The theory of evolution is often used by the ignorant, uneducated and stupid to prove that science is somehow uncertain about the fact of evolution. This is not the case. Evolution is an established fact. Just as one can determine the climate of a place by study, one can determine that evolution happens. The theories are why they happen. In evolution's case, there's Darwinism, (Survival of the fittest), mutation and others. Each one explains evolution in part but no single one of them explains it in whole. Put them all together and you have a pretty clear picture that there are a lot of things that make evolution happen.

The same goes for climate change. We can see the climate changing. Glaciers are retreating at a pace never before seen in modern history. The polar ice caps are melting more and faster than ever recorded in the last million years. The seas are rising faster than at any other time known to man. Plants and animals are dying off or migrating to new places where they've never been found before. Drought is hitting places which normally saw good rainfall while other places that were normally dry are seeing record rainfall. This isn't just a local thing. It's global. And the indications are that it's been getting hotter around the world for the last fifty or sixty years, but really getting hot over about the last 20. For whatever reason, global warming is a FACT.

(Note to you pseudo-science geeks: Yes, there are variations, but we're looking at the overall trend here. Stop nit picking the trees while the forest is on fire.)

Way back in the 1970's the word was "Ice Age" and the thought was that, according to historic trends and cycles, we should be getting a colder planet. What science we knew of at the time - at least popularly speaking - seemed to support this conclusion. But science doesn't sit still when it comes to observable facts. Unlike religion which can afford to be dogmatic and unyielding regardless of whatever nonsense it says is "true", science must always fit the facts and the facts, even then, indicated there was a flaw in the "soon to come ice age" conclusion. It wasn't widely known back then, but several climatic scientists were noticing that if the ice age was going to arrive on time, it was going to have to get a lot colder a lot faster than it was actually doing because instead of getting colder, it looked like things were really getting warmer.

But it wasn't a LOT warmer, so not a lot was said about it at the time. There are minor variations in climate over the years - cycles were very big back then because they tended to explain the periodic ice ages the Earth has experienced over the last 250,000 years or so. WHY these cycles happened wasn't really known. The theories were a longer-term cycle in the sun's activity (brightness, heat, solar storms, etc,), shifts in the planet's axis, continental drift or even differences in how the heat and light of the sun hit the earth as the solar system traveled around the galaxy.

But it takes 250 million years for the earth to orbit around the galaxy, and the changes in climate couldn't be explained on that time frame. The cycles of the sun could be measured by the traces of solar particles embedded in ice and soil over the eons. As technology improved, and global weather patterns could be modeled on computers, climate changes could be better predicted and traced.

The current reason given for ice ages is the way the earth's orbit of the sun varies in regular cycles. Called the Milankovitch cycles, it basically alters the amount of radiant energy (heat) that hits the northern hemisphere (where the greatest amount of land is at this point in Earth's life). As the cycle occurs, the amount of heat hitting the northern hemisphere changes, going up and down over the cycle. The more that hits it, the hotter it gets and the ice retreats. The less that hits it, the less the ice melts in the summer, and the more ice there is overall.

The earth's landmasses have moved around a lot which is why ice ages haven't been happening all along. Most of the last 600,000,000 years, the climate of the Earth has been a lot warmer than it is today. The next ice age is due in around 30,000 years, according to the Milankovitch cycles.

Now, since the 1970's, as has been pointed out, science has developed much better tools with which to examine our planet. This is why there's a major discrepancy between climate thought 40 years ago and today.

One of those "discoveries" made during that time is how different natural gasses effect climate. Methane, water vapor (yes, that's a gas), carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone and a host of others play a significant role in how warm or cold our planet can become. Methane tops the list in warming gasses. It's about 25-33 times more "warming" than the currently talked about carbon-based gasses (CO2 and CO). Fortunately, there's not a lot of methane in the air or things would be a lot hotter. (I won't go into the Methane Hydrate thing here, though it can have a catastrophic warming effect on the planet and is becoming an increasing concern as things heat up overall.)

And in those discoveries was the amount of gasses that are not naturally occurring - man made gasses - which seem to have risen in pretty much the same way the planet was apparently heating up. It was an apparent cause and effect link between the two. It appears (and still does) that man-made pollutants (those gasses that man has pumped into the atmosphere) can and have caused the earth to start to get warmer on a planetary scale.

Now, the Earth is a complex place. It has a lot of natural things that happen to it in ways that aren't always fully understood. Like I said, science doesn't always give an exact or precise answer to questions about what's going on with our universe or even our little piece of universe.

Is mankind causing global warming?

The definitive answer is: We don't know. The scientific answer is, "We think so, but we're not 100% positive."

The whole point is that IT IS HAPPENING. Whether or not greenhouse gasses (the gasses that make the planet get hotter) are the cause, warming is happening, whether because of natural causes or not. Is man responsible? Science says "Probably", but like the theories of evolution, no one "theory" explains everything.

But the bottom line is that global warming is happening and that, regardless of the cause, adding more and more of the ingredients which WILL increase the heat - the speed at which our planet gets hotter - isn't very bright on our part.

Let's face it, even if the gas didn't start the house on fire, throwing more of it on the fire isn't going to help put the fire out. It will have the opposite effect.

So them's the facts about Global Warming. Let's now look at how those facts have been used.

We'll start with the left of the political spectrum: The tree huggers. It would seem these people would be happy if mankind were to disappear and leave Mother Earth alone. The truth of the matter is that they just want mankind to live "in harmony" with the Earth. That would be fine if we knew how to do that in the first place. We don't. There is no formula for it. There are no societies on the face of the planet that do. The best we can hope to do is to reduce our impact on the planet as much as is reasonably possible and settle for that.

The left side has taken the global warming issue, the correlation (The close relationship) between man-made pollutants and the rise in global temperatures as a clarion call proving that man's impact on the planet is bad and that we all have to go back to eating vegetables and living in communes or some terribly impractical thing like that.

But, as usual, it is the right side that has caused the most harm. They are the side which supports the status quo (remember, conservatives do NOT like change, and global warming is also known as "Climate Change"). This means they don't want anything to change. They want us to continue to buy gas, gas guzzlers and eat cows until we explode. Or something like that. The point is they have gone out of their way to discredit the link between man-made greenhouse gasses and global warming. They have hired "scientists" (another word for them are educated, paid actors) to say that mankind has had no impact on global warming. Some even go so far as to say mankind can do nothing about global warming because it's all entirely a natural phenomenon, so eat, drink and be merry, and, oh, yeah, fill up your car and buy oil products.

They both miss the point.

Global warming is a FACT. Like Evolution is happening, the planet IS getting hotter. The evidence for this is undeniable. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF MANKIND CAUSED IT OR NOT, YOU DON"T THROW GASOLINE ON A FIRE TO PUT IT OUT!

Oil is a limited natural resource. Coal is an extremely polluting one. Both produce gigatons of carbon gasses per year due to man-made machinery. Both have a heavily negative impact on our environment and the people, plants and animals therein. Oil is produced by many middle eastern nations which overtly or covertly support or tolerate terrorism and oil proceeds often are used to fund terrorism. Big Oil hired fake scientists to prove mankind isn't the cause of global warming, but no amount of fakery can disprove the fact that man-made pollutants, like gas on a fire, cause an increase in retained atmospheric heat.

The bottom line is Big Oil wants to protect itself from losing money due to more efficient, cleaner ways to produce energy. They will say that destroying Big Oil and the things that go with it will destroy the world's economy - and with the world's economy already in the toilet, now is not the time to be looking to other things to use for energy production.

Well, I dispute that completely. The fact is, now IS the time to be looking to new things. Obviously, the status quo sucks. We need a change and clean energy is the way to do it.

I don't expect any one thing to become the "new energy" of the future like oil has been up to now. There are too many different ways of producing clean energy for us to focus on one to the exclusion of all. Big Oil has gone out of its way to discredit each individual method (too expensive, too impractical for one area or another, etc), but taken together, they can actually do the job. Big Oil has ONE commodity: Oil. Energy production tends to focus on coal as a catch-all means of energy production.

Energy production isn't limited to one method, folks. But in order to produce cleaner energy, we need to get away from the "one means fits all" mentality the energy producers in the world are saying is our only option.

As for the economic impact, let's look at this like businessmen. You have an established business that performs it's role, but is extremely polluting, increasingly expensive, often unreliable, limited in what they can produce in total and inherently dangerous in that it increases the amount of global warming the planet is experiencing. It's an extremely profitable business, but if we destroy the planet in the process of running the business (or make it so miserable, millions, if not billions, of people will perish), there won't be a planet in which to spend the profits.

(Yes, there are people who are that short-sighted as to not care that this will happen).

But from a business point of view, these detriments of Big Energy are actually a business opportunity. There is a need for a clean, renewable way to produce energy for our modern society. Further, that "way" doesn't have to be limited to a single method, but can be tailored for a region if there is a particular thing about that region which lends itself to energy production. Even within that region, there's no reason to limit energy production to one particular, regionally advantageous method.

When it comes to green-tech, there's no limit, which means the opportunities for business investment and return on that investment are equally limitless. The economic boost to creating an entirely new branch of industry (Green tech in all its forms) can be what drives the economic recovery we so desperately need. All we need are enough people of vision to see that cleaving to the past will not address the future.

We need new ways to deal with global warming - new technologies that can cope with a changing climate and new ways to reduce the impact global warming will have on us. Green tech in all its variations is the way to go. Create a new industry to replace the moribund and ultimately dead-end way we deal with energy production now.

Global warming is happening. The economy sucks. In combating the former, we can fix the problems with the latter and, maybe, help make a planet that, even if it's going to be warmer, will be cleaner for all of us to live on.