A recent Register editorial cartoon had a climate change doubter complaining about the effect of the drought on the food supply. “What am I going to eat,” he asks a farmer. “Your words,” was the terse reply.
While most climatologists do believe that man-made gases are contributing to global warming, it is also true long-lasting heat waves and prolonged droughts have occurred in the past. This one may turn out to be the mother of them all. After all, it’s only July. There’s still August to go and past Septembers have been known to sizzle.
But even though the heat hangs on and the rains stay away, it can’t be absolutely demonstrated that man and his incessant production of carbon dioxide and other climate-changing gases is causing all or any of this devastating summer destruction, can it now?
Well, no. The world’s climate can’t be put in a test tube and studied. Climate scientists can only speculate since they can’t control climate and experiment with it. They can measure climate and its effects, however. And their measurements show average temperatures world-wide have risen and continue to rise. They also can report on incidences of storms, count the square miles affected by unusually hot or unusually dry weather, gather those facts and report them in an organized fashion — which they have done.
The compendium of weather information over recent years shows global warming is a fact not a theory; that the number of devastating floods has risen as has the number of square miles affected by too much or too little rain; that changes in other weather patterns have affected the maturation rates and dates of crops as well as the number of crop and tree destroying insects. A careful study of weather facts gathered by scientists supports the global-warming theories spun by them.
Since this is the case, it would seem prudent to act on the assumption that reducing production of carbon dioxide by burning less oil, coal and other carbon-based fuels would at least slow the rate of climate change.
THE CHOICES are clear enough. Doing nothing would save quite a bit of money short-term. All of the alternatives to burning oil and coal to produce electrical energy and heat homes and businesses are more expensive.
But if current climate change theory is correct, then the greenhouse effect will create changes in ocean levels and the global production of food over, say, the next century, which will be infinitely more expensive to the entire world population.
The trade-offs seem to be in the no-brainer category. Yes, carbon-based fuel folks — a relatively small number of people — would be hurt if they could sell their products only to companies that would make plastic from them rather than burn them. But seeing those industries replaced by new, non-polluting sources of energy could turn out to be a job-producing, wealth-producing boon, and if reducing the assault on the life-sustaining atmosphere that surrounds our earth did reduce global warming, slow the melting of the polar ice caps and make farming everywhere a more secure enterprise it would be impossible to calculate the economic benefits realized.
The more one looks at these either-ors, the easier it is to call for all-out war against manmade climate change, starting today.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.