It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is a problem. The fact that 99 percent of the scientific community is in agreeance regarding the human impact on the planet, is pretty well known and accepted. Where’s your documentaion saying that’s a lie? Did you ask 99 percent of the scientific personally to see if their solidarity on the subject is really all just a hoax?

I can never figure out what behooves skeptics to continue denying the phenomena of climate change. Regardless of your ignorance, you’ll be suffering alongside everyone else, and fewer and fewer people will give your continued and misguided skepticism another thought.

During the Devonian period 385 million years ago, there was an explosion of forest growth which covered the Earth. This was a time when the Earth cooled, perhaps encouraged by the the spread of fern trees which took in carbon dioxide. Of course, there were no cars or other carbon-dioxide-belching machines then, but what the Earth had were lots of volcanoes.

The growth of the fern forests could have been spurred by the high CO2 content of the air from volcanic activity. Consequently, this greenhouse gas became trapped in their tissue. Eventually, these trees died off and were transformed into the fossil fuels we now use, like coal. In effect, people now are releasing carbon dioxide that was originally part of the atmosphere anyway. It’s a shame that there aren’t that many trees to store it safely again.

Oldest tree fossil found, scientists say: http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/218996?c_id=wom-bc-ar

I also dislike the “science is settled” meme — though probably for the opposite reason than you. Like Hansen, I think the situation is considerably more dire than the IPCC lets on, which I think will be evident to most everyone within the decade.

And I tried to tell you about some of the people behind this – what I characterize as a hoax and power-grab. Oh well. Maybe you’ll have a chance to meet Maurice Strong in your travels someday and maybe you can share a chuckle over the things written about him on the internet. Or maybe you’ll meet Paul Watson and he can regale you with stories of his adventures on the high seas or you can ask him to expound on his ideas about humans and how the population should be reduced. Enjoy.

And good luck with the book. This issue is probably not going to go away overnight like the Y2K hysteria did, so if the book is well-written it should sell steadily for a few years at least.

I guess I have other fish to fry closer to home. The kids are running out of summer and school will begin again soon. Last year I got into a debate about global warming with a middle school science teacher. He threw a public tantrum and lost his job (teachers don’t have tenure in this state). That was fun. You’re a lot cooler under pressure than he was.

I haven’t met my son’s science teacher for next year yet. But I bet he’s heard of me.

This is from The Cornell Chronicle, 8/6/98 –

http://www.news.cornell.edu/ Chronicle/ 98/ 8.6.98/ Broecker.html

“We’re poking the climate system by adding greenhouse gases” like carbon dioxide, the Columbia University scientist said in a July 22 Summer Sessions lecture. “Will poking this angry beast cause it to lash out?” he asked the large Call Auditorium audience in Kennedy Hall, displaying a homemade drawing of the metaphorical “beast” incarnate.

Broecker doesn’t know the answer to his question, he admitted, nor does anyone else. But he doesn’t want the world to find out the answer by continuing to release tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases, emitted when fossil fuels are burned, could alter the behavior of the “beast,” unleashing radical changes in temperature and rainfall, he said.

The conviction that greenhouse gases potentially promise climate damage has led Broecker to offer some unorthodox technical solutions (pumping carbon dioxide to the bottom of the ocean) and unpalatable policy suggestions (increasing gasoline taxes “dramatically”).

…… to date, the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature has been smaller than predicted.

Studies of Greenland ice and California sediments point to rapid shifts in temperature and rainfall that happened in a matter of decades or less. So it is best to conceptualize the climate system as having several “modes of operation,” Broecker said. Rather than changing slowly, as some would have it, Broecker said that climate can switch from one state to another abruptly.

“Whatever this phenomenon is, it’s global and it’s big,” he said. In Broecker’s view, likely causes of climate shifts are changes in patterns of ocean currents, which carry heat to and from continents, and the amount of atmospheric water vapor, which increases with the level of carbon dioxide and raises temperature.

…. Since no one understands exactly how the climate system works, why take the chance that adding such large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere might trip some unknown threshold level and provoke a climate shift? ”

What I get from this is that 1) Broecker believes the real mover & shaker in climate change are the oceans, 2) does not know if burning fossil fuels is a danger because he hasn’t studied it, but thinks that it might be, 3) has determined that past climate shifts (before we can blame humans) have happened very quickly, and 4) admits that “no one understands exactly how the climate system works” but is of the ‘why take a chance?’ side.

Actually sounds like a fairly reasonable fellow, as real scientists should be. I just don’t like his (par for the course) suggestion for higher taxes. And his proposal to pump stuff to the bottom of the ocean. It seems like the latter idea would be fiddling with nature and wouldn’t be supported by real environmentalists.

But again Joe, we are back to the question of ‘the cause’. All conclusions should be open to challenge in a real scientific debate.

“The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges,” wrote Wallace Broecker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, in a 1995 Nature article.

And that’s because the negative feedbacks are much weaker than the positive/amplifying feedbacks.

I’d also note that thearticle you cite, Alvin, ends: “Overall that team calculated that the entire Arctic Ocean is capable of absorbing up to 66 million tons of carbon dioxide annually — more is possible if the sea ice melting continues. however, the amount won’t balance global warming. Currently worldwide carbon emissions are over 30 BILLION tons a year.”

Also, Alvin, you miss the big point — if the Denyers were right, that the warming is not mostly due to human emissions, then there would be no point in regulating those emissions. Yes, the cleverest Denyers acknowledge some warming but they are fundamentally mistaken about the cause. That mistake must always be challenged.

Here are two links that give a lot of biographical information.

http://www.sovereignty.net/p/sd/strong.html

http://www.afn.org/~govern/strong.html

In this next link there was just one mention of the man in a fairly long article about eugenics and population control.

http://catholicinsight.com/ online/ bioethics/ article_664.shtml

Here is the passage that mentions him:

“….. in a document called NSSM 200, called for a covert depopulation policy included in its American foreign aid program. At the U.N. conference in 1991 the national delegates, influenced by Maurice Strong, secretary general of the Earth Summit, supported a policy consistent with the notion that the presence of human beings on the earth and the health of the planet were incompatible.”

I have always had a distrust of the UN and communists/socialists in general. This is indeed food for thought. I always had an aversion to the idea of a “one world government’ because it seems like having different countries sort of acts like international checks and balances, but having one all-powerful government would be like the old saying ‘power corrupts, while absolute power currpts absolutely’.

The Earth is an incredibly complex system, and what some hysterical people don’t seem to realize is that humans are a natural part of that system. We are not ‘the AIDS virus of the Earth’ as Paul Watson says, deserving of extreme control. We are part of this beautiful, mind-bogglingly complicated system. To boil the whole system down to one poorly-understood factor is short-sighted, unscientific, and a waste of time and money.

In James Lovelock’s intriguing Gaia theory, the Earth is seen as an entity or organism in Her own right. Thinking in that direction, our polluting might be seen as exactly what we are supposed to be doing; an important, if not understood part of the system.

I much prefer science to new-agey ideas, but it’s food for thought. And I haven’t seen any reason to end scientific endeavor in any field. Heck, there are researchers still studying gravity and wasn’t that field ’settled’ quite a while back?