4.26 Can We Stop Climate Change?
I remember as a child seeing a funny bumper sticker.
It was funny because there is no good reason to stop continental drift and we can't stop continental drift. It makes fun of many of the impossible and bumper stickers misguided people have on their cars. Here is another bumper sticker.
Climate has been changing since the earth became a planet. This sticker is not so different than the continental drift sticker.
What if we assume that the climate alarmists are right and the carbon dioxide we produce is burning up the planet? There certainly has been a lot of heat this last summer (2023)
Weather.com reported on July 21, 2023:
In Phoenix, Thursday marked the 21st day in a row with a high temperature of 110 degrees or hotter, which broke the record for the longest such streak in the city's weather records. They've also had 12 straight days (through Friday) in which their lows have not dipped below 90 degrees, including an all-time record-warmest low temperature of 97 on Wednesday.
I saw a video of an emergency room doctor talking about how the extended heat in Phoenix is bringing in more emergency cases than usual. That confirms to me that it was hotter than usual in Arizona.
There were reports of widespread forest fires in Canada in the summer of 2023 which have burned more land than was burned in 1995 which is the previous record according to Newsweek. That was corroborated by the sky above me turning yellow during the day, ash floating in the air and the air irritating my throat. The media that tells us this is due to global warming leaves out that Canada has a wildfire season every year and has very dry weather in general and its forests aren't managed so flammable tinder builds up and this isn't the first time that the sky has changed color due to Canadian fires. However the sky turning color and ash floating in the air is a rare event and cause for concern.
According to the climate alarmists we have to act fast and do whatever we can to save our planet before it's too late. They say we have to stop producing fossil fuels, and we have to cut down on fertilizer for our farms and force businesses such as pizza restaurants to spend tens of thousands of dollars on emission cutting equipment. We have dramatically reduced fossil fuel production during the Biden administration and one result has been that the cost of everything has been going up and people are getting poorer. The Netherlands has been seizing the farms of its farmers to cut down on fertilizer use. Less fertilizer will make food more scarce and more expensive. Still if the world is going to end if we don't cut down on carbon dioxide emissions what choice do we have?
We do have a choice and that is not to destroy our economies. Why? One reason is that if the United States stopped all burning of fossil fuels it would only reduce the increase in temperature by 2 tenths of a degree centigrade by the year 2100. Dianna Furtchgott, an economist from the Heritage foundation explains that in the video below.
She mentions that Americans are being forced to switch to expensive electric vehicles. Where is the electricity going to come from to power all those electric vehicles? When they cause power outages what is going to happen to food stored in refrigerators in homes and in stores? What is going to happen to people in hospitals who depend on devices that require electricity? A searing heat wave was pushing California’s electric grid to the brink of blacking out in September 2022 when, in a frantic bid to keep the lights on, officials implored electric car owners to wait a few hours before plugging in their vehicles. That request from the California Independent System Operator came just days after state regulators approved a plan to ban sales of new gas cars in 2035. What is going to happen in 2035?
Despite all the reductions in fossil fuel production in the United States the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been going up. One reason for that is that we still need fossil fuel and products made with fossil fuel, so we buy them from countries like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. The other reason is that countries like China, Russia and India keep increasing their fossil fuel use. So even if what all the climate alarmists say is true (which it isn't), our policies to fight global warming don't stop global warming they just make us poorer.
What if the climate alarmists are wrong and their hypothesis that the world is about to end because of climate change is wrong? What if whatever heating we see is part of natural climate cycles. How do we know if they are right or wrong? We have ice core records of past heat. Here is a graph showing both the temperature and the carbon dioxide levels for the last 800,000 years. The blue graph is of temperature. According to that graph there is nothing abnormal about today's temperature.
Climate alarmists point to record heat but there has been record cold as well. Climate change alarmists explain away increases in cold weather and hot weather as being the result of increased carbon dioxide emissions. This is suspicious because originally they said that carbon dioxide would heat the planet. They changed their story to it will cause cold and hot weather because of embarassing cold weather. Its also suspicious because of Climategate and other fraudulent activity by climate alarmists some of which is documented in these lessons here on this website. We also need to remember that hot weather doesn't mean it's hot because of carbon dioxide weather changes and the climate changes and has been doing so from the beginning of planet earth.
