Al Gore follows a long tradition of American presidential hopefuls who have tried to create their own place in history and immortalise their achievements they would like us to believe they have accomplished. Gore’s astonishing achievement was his blaming of carbon dioxide for being the causal factor of Global Warming, and he managed to garner billions of dollars in a worldwide attempt to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. Some epitaph!
Global Warming and Global Cooling are natural unstoppable cycles. There have been much hotter global temperatures than the present, as late as 1100 years ago when the Arctic ocean was navigable and Greenland was indeed a green temperate land. There is some questionable evidence that the temperature rise that we are experiencing now, may be faster than we might expect. However, this would more likely be due to the heat caused by our energy-dependent lifestyle, because practically all energy sources are fossil fuels which produce heat and electricity which is eventually converted to heat. So if is that extra heat you want to get rid of, you must reduce the demand for energy, and that consequently means reducing the number of people demanding energy — one of those kinds of difficult problems that politicians just don’t have the guts to tackle, so they create imaginary scapegoats like carbon dioxide.
However, by 2060 the extra heat problem will solve itself, because by then, we will have squandered all of our fossil fuel and so the energy-dependent culture will end because no other fuels could possibly cater for the energy consumption we have now, let alone a world in which all people have equal access to the energy sources our Western civilisation now squanders. The consequences of having to live with the solar energy that falls on your share of Earth are far greater threats to our planet than any amount of carbon dioxide ever could wreak.
I again watched Al Gore’s movie An inconvenient truth a few nights ago and had to admire the professionally orchestrated and sensational way in which his team put together and illustrated so many good and factual phenomena, then made a great leap of faith, claiming that Global Warming was caused by “human activity”. His dramatic fork-lift scene showing how our production of carbon dioxide, correlated with Global Warming left everybody with the impression that carbon dioxide was the causal factor. But why didn’t Gore mention it during his election campaign, if it was such an apocalyptic issue, why did he leave it until after the elections when he was headed for ignominy?
Who discovered that it was carbon dioxide? A politician!
It begged the question why the whole of the scientific community with all its knowledge and resources didn’t discover that carbon dioxide was the causal factor of Global Warming. Why was it left to a politician who has a degree in politics to discover — especially a politician whose academic thesis was about the efficacy of television? Where were such institutes such as the Australia’s National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology, the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Climatology, the World Climate Conference and the subsequent intergovernmental negotiations for the Framework Convention on Climate Change? Probably Gore hadn’t told them about carbon dioxide being the causal factor of Climate Change because it wasn’t, and meteorologists would not have believed that any intelligent person would have proposed such a palpably absurd notion.
The Climate Cycle deniers believe that carbon dioxide is “the” only causal factor of Global Warming. How naive!
There is a profound difference between a causal and a coincidental relationship. Nowhere in An inconvenient truth did Gore say that there was a causal relationship between rising levels of carbon dioxide and Global Warming, probably because there isn't. But all of the disciples of Gore, including our Parliament, got the impression that carbon dioxide is not only “a” causal factor, but they believe it is “the” only causal factor of Global Warming! How simplistic and naive! In fact, there is a correlation between many factors and Global Warming, such as overpopulation, the heat from burning exponentially more fossil fuels, the process by which the Sun burns its fuel, the amount of motor cars in China, the number of corgi dogs in Singapore, the amount of tequila produced in Mexico as well as carbon dioxide. But there is one particular factor that has a correlation with Global Warming — water vapour — that would better explain Mr Gore’s focus on a greenhouse gas as the singular causal factor. The reason is that as Global Warming causes greater water vapour (evaporation) which is by far the most abundant Greenhouse Gas, and since there is 340 times more water vapour than there is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and they both react to solar heat in a similar way, even a 1% rise in water vapour would have a greater effect by a factor of 17:1, than even a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide — and we are nowhere near that. So why didn’t Mr Gore vilify water vapour instead? Well, after all, Gore is qualified in political spin, not science, isn’t he? But Gore has proven himself even better at garnering the support of a significant number well-meaning, philanthropic Greenies who are wanting everybody to sacrifice now to avoid what seems to them to be obvious armageddons in the future — provided it doesn’t interfere too much with their standard of living.
Just look at all those impoverished scientists who jumped on the money bandwagon that Gore started
What was the world wide reaction to Gore’s theory? Governments and well-meaning but gullible rich Greenies and philanthropists found billions of research dollars to promote Gore’s spin and research and verify his theory. What a pity there was no research money to find out if his theory was indeed fact. Problem with the credibility of Gore’s theory is that after the five years since the film An Inconvenient Truth was released, nobody, that is no reputable qualified climatologist has been able to show a causal link between carbon dioxide and Global Warming.
I would trust the local taxi driver’s opinion before I trusted any politician’s.
So you can either believe an American politician, Albert (just call me Al) Gore and his carbon dioxide theory, that he dreamed up just after he lost the race to become president and was about to be headed for ignominy, or you could believe Australia's chief climatologist William Kininmonth who headed or was part of all of the aforementioned scientific panels above who reckoned that Al’s theories are ... (an unscientific term that William would never use).
How embarrassing it would have been for the Prime Minister to be caught out once again misleading his constituents!
And to whom did Australia’s Prime Minister (who you might be surprised to know, was another politician) entrust our money to rid us of this dreaded carbon dioxide? He gave it to a zoologist and a bean counter. It certainly begs the question why he didn’t give it to our number one climatologist? Could it be that our ever-truthful Prime Minister would have known that our chief climatologist would have died of laughter at the very thought of it?
Our political leader thinks that if Australia commits economic suicide, everybody else will follow our great leadership.
Our newest Prime Minister is wanting to create her own epitaph, by asking us to lead the World in the taxing of the burning of coal and oil if it is burnt in Australia. However if our same coal is burnt in other countries where they do not have as intelligent politicians like we have (which is every other country), our fossil fuels will not be taxed. Which means we can wave goodbye to our manufacturing industry. If our Prime Minister were genuine about not wanting our coal to be burnt “dirty”, why does she not tax it before it leaves Australia maybe giving it back if the importing country manages to not use our fuels and make carbon dioxide — which, of course, is an impossibility. Then we would have that “level playing field” that every other nation ignores, but our Government won’t give to our industries, or what is left of them. Rudd must be killing himself laughing at the way he has pushed her to take the big dive. Isn’t revenge sweet? And don’t get me started on some obscure bean counter’s illogical scheme of “Carbon Trading”. Just examine his proposition for two seconds. Does it make sense to any reasonably thinking person?
We are in another warm cycle like we had in the tenth century, when the polar seas were navigable.
Few qualified people dispute that Global Warming is happening, and some reputable scientists agree with Mr Gore’s data that shows that our atmosphere is warming at a greater rate than it might normally be expected to rise. As well, Climate Cycle believers (including myself) agree that “human activity” is probably the main causal factor. But what is this so coyly-named “human activity” — playing ping-pong, too much sex, moving too quickly? All Al could/should have said was that Global Warming was caused by the production of carbon dioxide, but he didn’t. Methinks Gore then had to invented something like carbon dioxide as being the cause of Global Warming to avoid mentioning the really hard problem of the overpopulation bomb because if he had, it would have guaranteed instant ignominy for him.
Global Warming and Global Cooling has been happening since the Earth accreted over four billion years ago.
There is a much simpler explanation, that Global Warming is a natural cyclic event, but there is probably an additional factor — the heat produced by humans burning ever more fossil fuels. And even though this burning of fossil fuels produces a tiny fraction of heat within the atmosphere compared with the infra-red radiation from the Sun, those greenhouse gases — of which carbon dioxide is an insignificant fraction — don’t allow the extra heat from the burning of fossil fuels to completely escape — so it accumulates. Some reputable scientists think that the cycles of Global Warming and Global Cooling may be caused by the variance of Earth's axis or orbit around the Sun, other speculate that it is due to the way in which the Sun consumes its fuel, others speculate that it is due to the activities of sunspots around the equator so that more heat is directed away from the planetary disc*. My friend believes that it is caused by God and her theory is as credible as Al’s. But no reputable scientist would claim a causal relationship between any or all of these theories and Global Warming.
It’s the heat from an energy based society that is adding a poofteenth more heat to the atmosphere stupid!
Even more ridiculous, our politicians are wanting us to produce more energy, which directly results in heating the atmosphere even more. Could our politicians be so dumb, so science deficient that they cannot understand that practically ALL fuels, when burnt to do work (be transformed from potential energy to kinetic energy), eventually become heat — the very stuff they try to tell us they are trying to get rid of? (Don't answer that one — you put them there.) An inconvenient coincidence is that this accumulation unhappily coincides with the same kind of warm cyclic that happened 1100 years ago. So now we have the unhappy coincidence of heat from the burning of fossil fuels combining with the heat of Earth’s natural heat cycles.
So-called “clean energy” sources consume more “dirty” fuel in their manufacture than they produce “clean” energy.
Of course all politicians say that they want to get rid of “dirty” fuels, that is, fuels that produce “nasty” carbon dioxide, but nobody has told them that ALL their so-called “clean energy” sources, such as wind, solar, wave and turbo,probably consume more “dirty” fuel in the manufacture of the collectors and transmission lines, than they produce so called “clean” energy. For example, to harness wind power, there is no “clean” energy gain after using all the “dirty” fossil fuels used to mine, transport, manufacture and construct the 20 metre long plastic blades, turbine generators, steel towers, concrete bases, access roads and send the electricity along the hundreds of kilometres of steel towers and power lines — all produced by burning fossil fuels. And by the time it gets from where the wind blows to where the electricity is needed, as much as 50% of the power is lost. And to cap all of this, windmills only last twenty years before they are economically unviable. As for other so-called “clean energy” sources, concrete and steel hydro dams silt up, solar panels decay, wave engines don’t last and even taking the heat from geo-thermal hot spots cools the areas, creates stress levels between tectonic plates and quickly corrodes the pipes.
A “thicker” blanket of greenhouse gases makes our days cooler but our nights warmer — a heat-neutral effect.
The addition of more carbon dioxide certainly produces a “thicker” blanket of greenhouse gases, but the extra thickness would probably reflect as much IR (heat) radiation away from Earth as it retains by reflecting it back to Earth, thus making our days cooler but our nights warmer — in other words, it would have a heat-neutral effect. I support the stopping of burning fossil fuels for other obvious environmental reasons. If we taxed the fuels before it is exported, that would give us the often quoted even playing ground, so that Australian industry is not disadvantaged. But just taxing the burning of fuels in Australia will do nothing to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the other nations to whom we export our fuels will produce even more carbon dioxide so that they might catch up with our indulgent lifestyle.
The term “ human activity” is a cowardly politician’s way of avoiding losing votes of the well-meaning Toorak greenies.
Could it be that brave Al was not brave enough to admit that we have too many poor people who need large families to survive, but who all demand their share of the good life we have created by our burning all of the fossil fuels quickly to produce the enormous amounts of energy we squander so freely to maintain our unsustainable style of living? Come to think of it, what reputable scientist doesn’t believe that the Earth has too many people? But is there one honest politician that would be so brave as to utter that? I do apologise to my more erudite friends who would be screaming that a “honest politician” is a non sequitur.
The real inconvenient truth is that our fossil fuel wealth will be exhausted by 2060 and our lives will be profoundly different.
The real inconvenient truth is that our Western Technological society is so dependent on squandering vast quantities of fossil fuels to support our indulgent life style that our fossil fuel wealth will be exhausted by 2060. Then, billions of people will die, because without fossil fuels we will only have and food-production capacity from the solar energy that falls on a person’s share of the Earth.
Simple mathematics show that a population of two-and-a-half billion people is a politically acceptable number for which to plan. But, if you believe that all the other living things have a right to exist as well as humans, then a World population of a half billion people would be a more humane population. The consequences of this is for reputable politicians (if only) and lateral-thinking planners to address — just in case I am right!
There is a coincidental relationship between Global Warming and the production of carbon dioxide, but not a causal relationship
There may well be a causal relationship between Global Warming and the exponentially-increasing burning of fossil fuels that our exponentially-increasing human population is demanding. Therein lies the truthful part of the half-truth. But there is not one skerrick of evidence that Global Warming is caused by carbon dioxide. There is a relationship between Global Warming and the production of carbon dioxide, but why did Gore fail to mention that it is a coincidental relationship, not a causal relationship — or was it that he just didn’t understand the difference?
Popular belief trumps reason — a plea for responsible governance.
Because half truths are, and always have been, a very potent factor for persuading people to do something they wouldn’t normally do, selfish, evil and/or power-seeking people will keep using them, to the detriment and enslavement of others. And until loud voices ask for evidence of causal relationships, false assumptions and superstition will continue to misshape our society. However, as I said in the beginning, by 2060 the extra heat problem will solve itself, because by then, we will have squandered all of our fossil fuel and so the energy-dependent culture will end because no other fuels could possibly cater for the energy consumption we have now, let alone a world in which all people have equal access to the energy sources our Western civilisation now squanders. The consequences of having to live with the solar energy that falls on your share of Earth are far greater threats to our planet than any amount of carbon dioxide ever could wreak. If you ponder this scenario, it will either strike terror into your thinking or move you to demand that we seek a truly sustainable existence for all humans, animals and our beautiful little planet.
And next time you hear someone with a PhD and a gold travel card preaching the Gospel according to carbon dioxide, shouting that the end is nigh and claiming “Robust data”, ask him if is aware of the other eras when the World had even higher temperatures and they didn’t have carbon dioxide to blame — and, of course, how they solved the problem.
* it is worthy to note that after a prolonged drought in Australia, during which sunspots were absent, this year we have dramatic Climate Change, this time a wetter climate, and at the same time sunspots have been reappearing.