We received this Spout Off criticizing my leeriness of the value of the efforts to stop global warming. It reads:
Too bad Art Hall didn’t fax his anti-climate change column to the representatives of the 200 nations at the Paris Accord meetings before they voted to reduce greenhouse gases so they could have read his climate change denial “facts” before striking an agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. I mean, who do you believe? The publisher of a weekly newspaper who thinks the earth is under 10,000 years old? Or thousands of the world’s leading scientists and mountains of peer-reviewed data and models that point to greenhouse gases accelerating destructive global warming and climate change?” West Cape May
Before I address the points the author made, let me say, I welcome such Spout Offs, or better yet, letters to the editor. It is this exchange of ideas which made our country what it is.
Back to global warming, the fact that 195 nations sent 4,000 delegates to Paris to craft an accord does not prove they are on the right side of the issue. It was 400 years ago, in 1615, that Galileo was arrested and tried for heresy for holding a different view from Pope Urban VIII and the Jesuits. Galileo did not believe, as they did, that the earth was the center of the universe. We now know that he was right, and Pope Urban and the Catholic Church was wrong. To stand up against the Church in that day was a frightful thing. He was one man against the whole world of thought.
Widespread agreement on a proposition does not make it so. During the earth’s existence, it has swung back and forth, between being completely frozen over to having no ice at the poles. Ice ages are powerful evidence of the natural climate change on the earth in the geological past. In the last 400,000 years, there have been four times when vast sheets of ice covered much of the earth, interspersed by warming periods. We are in one such period right now. Is the CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere altering this natural swing in any detrimental way? Some argue that earth temperature and CO2 have not been strongly correlated; others contend they are. Given this waxing and waning in temperature over the last 4.6 billion years, all likelihood is that pattern will continue.
You ask at this point why you should buy into my skepticism. Other than in math, science is never totally settled.
The interesting thing about the Paris Accord is that neither the left nor the right is happy with it. Some on the left says it doesn’t go nearly far enough to bring about any meaningful reduction in the possible warming trend, arguing that, to be effective; we need to reverse economic growth. They also lament that the goals are only aspirational, and not enforceable, so even the little possible benefit it might have had won’t actually take place.
The right and left agree that the benefits of the accord to the environment are small, but the right complains that the developing nations will pay a great price in diminished standard of living – and for what? Further they complain that the wealthy nations are to transfer to the others $100 billion annually, money they argue will go to corrupt governments, not needy people.
Before we accept growing government control of our lives, and before we accept diminished prosperity in pursuit reduced CO2 usage, it behooves us to know the arguments fully. We are going to pay an enormous price in this quest. Count me among the skeptics, of those who support this at this juncture.
Let’s continue this conversation, following the facts wherever they lead us. Let me recommend:
• “What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change,” by Prager U, along with a rebuttal, on YouTube;
• The New York Times, “Imagining a World Without Growth” by Eduardo Porter, Dec. 1, 2015
• BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/earth/water_and_ice/ice_age
Art Hall
From the Bible: Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol. 1 Corinthians 2:17 – 18
