[amazon_image id="0307266923" link="true" target="_blank" size="medium" ]Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming[/amazon_image]
Former Vice-President Al Gore’s call to action, An Inconvenient Truth, served as a rallying cry for environmentalists the world over, convinced that humanity is “sitting on a time bomb”. The trouble is, there is a persistent group of people who just don’t believe the claims—and not all of them are major shareholders in oil company stocks, either. So on what basis do these skeptics continue to maintain that global warming is not the catastrophe it’s billed as?
Well, to begin with, they challenge the idea that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant”. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have fluctuated greatly over the planet’s history, and everyone knows that plants “breathe” in carbon dioxide while humans breathe it out. Significant research exists that supports the idea that in an environment with higher CO2 levels, plant life will grow proportionally faster and healthier. For example, pine trees grown in an environment with 600 parts per million carbon dioxide (about twice what the concentration is in the present atmosphere) grew on average 200% faster compared to normal growth rates. And on a side note, if carbon dioxide were the problem, we would all be responsible for exacerbating it, since every human being exhales carbon dioxide all day long.
The fossil record, too, does not seem to support the idea that a carbon-rich environment would mean the end of all life. Rather, it implies that the world of the dinosaurs was much greener than the earth we know today—even at the poles. Mineral evidence from the same strata as plant fossils discovered from this era suggest a much higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than we have at present. Goethite rock samples, for example, point to a world with as much as fifteen times more CO2 than today.
Most global warming theory skeptics would not deny that the earth is getting warmer—as it has in fact since 1850, which was the end of the “Little Ice Age”. Their contention is with the assumption that this in fact due to the amount of carbon dioxide that is being put into the atmosphere. The existence of much higher levels of CO2—up to 10 times as much—before the Ice Age, without runaway catastrophic climate warming effects, implies that the current increases would have little or no effect.
But even if the doomsayers are correct, and the worst of climate predictions is true, and the polar ice caps melted completely, the oceans would rise by a few dozen meters at best. While this is perhaps bad news for those living in low-lying coastal areas, it is far from the drowning-continents scenario posited by the global warming theorists. Besides which, in the event of a global warming that significant, most of the warming would likely have taken place at the poles (resulting in the melted ice caps) and making those land areas much more habitable for human beings, as well.
David Turner blogs about how to look for solid MPH in environmental health programs.
