No, not an album by an iconic prog rock band. I am referring to the fact that the very ball of fire that gives us life on this planet is also capable of extinguishing it very quickly. But without going to that sort of extreme, I believe it is entirely believable that it is significantly responsible for the many climate changes experienced by the planet Earth.
It was after this point was brought up in a forum discussion that the following treatise was posted. After reading it I asked the author if I could reproduce it here. Details of his response at the end (needless to say it was in the affirmative).
Fact: we are in a warming period. It’s not yet warmed as far as it did in the last warming (when the vikings farmed cattle in Greenland), and it may not get that far.
Fact: CO2, sulphur and particulates are pollution caused by our burning of fossil fuels.
Pollutants can be (and some are) greenhouse gases. But they do not bring about climate change. The driver of that is that big uncontrolled nuclear fusion reactor in the sky. Saving our resources and preventing further pollution “Is A Good Thing” though. Bringing in the EV to replace the PV, though needs more—a lot more—investigation and consideration.
What if the extra power required for charging stations results in more CO2 emissions than would have been the case with continuing to use the PV?
How long could the remaining resources of coal and oil fuels carry that load?
What pollution cost would increased nuclear generation bring?
How can we safely (and this is a real sticking point) dispose of the nuclear residue?
Is fusion better?
Sure: it’s more efficient than fission and has been ten years away for 6 decades now. But it also has some nasty by-products. How do we dispose of the intensely radio-active reactor when it’s burnt out?
Would we be exchanging bad pollution for even worse pollution, fission or fusion?
Linking all this to preventing climate change is akin to the boy crying wolf, or the astrologer predicting a forty day and forty night flood because Venus is now in the House of Aquarius, the Water Carrier, while outside the sun shone in a cloudless sky …
In “Murder in the Cathedral,” Thomas Becket said:
There is no greater treason than doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
Nigel Calder (ex editor of New Scientist magazine) put it rather well:
the doomsayers are like the astrologers in the courts of kings.
Like those astrologers, they hold a privileged position. They have found predictions of disaster loosen the purse strings faster and build a better gravy train than telling everyone how to take advantage of the warming. So they resent and actively work to blacken any research that is contrary to theirs. Professor Shaviv has entered into an entertaining (amusing for me at any rate) fight with some who have tried to rubbish his research. (See his home page and dig through the links to find it … the effort is worth it!).
Professor Veizer is also not hesitant about fighting back. According to Dr. Veizer, the political agenda of climate change is predicated on the assumption that
CO2 equals warming equals climate change equals disas-
ter.
He does not dispute the first step in this equation is a warming, but he feels that there is a need to understand the relative role of greenhouse gases, particularly water vapour—which is approximately 4 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas—in the process of global warming.
Dr. Veizer wrote:
The deafening silence about the role of water in the climate debate is regrettable. If both water vapour and CO2 are an internal part of the system, and only the anthropogenic part of CO2 is considered external, the impact of the latter will be modified by water vapour. There is merit to the precautionary action of keeping the emissions as low as possible.
He is careful to note that the theories of climate change, separate from temperature change, are questionable. He points out that a direct causal relationship from CO2 to climate change is not supported by his study of the million-years time scale, nor the millennial-year time scale. Neither is it supported by the work of French scholars on ice cores. He points out that the notion of climate change on century or decadal time scales has not been
properly studied, yet.
We should not rush into carbon taxes or any climate change remedy yet. The science is a long way from being completed. New Zealand does NOT need to be seen to be among the first to head down what is probably a very dead end. Nor should we rush into EVs until some very serious engineering calculations and studies for supporting infra-structure have been done. But it sure wouldn’t hurt to be starting those studies yesterday!
zkarj wrote:
the fact that climate change is not new is that the Vikings were cattle farming in Greenland.
And during the Little Ice Age, the Dutch accepted the fact that their rivers were freezing over every winter, which they had never done before, by inventing ice-skates.
The author, Sophocles on the forum, also added the following in his response to me:
You should check this document as I quoted Dr Jan Veizer from it and paraphrased some of it’s content without attribution:
This is so you know how to use that content if you choose to do so.
Sophocles has, with Dr. Veizer’s help, produced a great talking point summary of why we should all question the whole ‘climate change’ doomsaying machine. There are almost certainly elements of truth in the ‘accepted’ line on climate change but we should never forget that the best lies are founded on a kernel of truth.