Your Medicine Men sometimes write about topics, such as global warming, which greatly influence health over the long term, even though they don't immediately affect your everyday health.
We've previously written about the scientific fallacies promoted by global warming hysterics. See "Global Warming? New Ice Age? Better to adapt than die".
Today we'll look at some dirty secrets about the claimed global warming problem.
One secret is that worldwide implementation of the Kyoto treaty wouldn't cause any measurable difference in global climate, even according to the proponents for the treaty.
The biggest change proponents project as a result of the treaty would be a reduction in global temperature due to human CO2 emissions by about 0.1 degree Celsius, after 50 years. That tiny change would be impossible to detect, given the natural climate variability.
Climatologist Roy Spencer. Ph.D.. of the University of Alabama further notes that we are currently unable to predict future climate change. This makes it impossible to tell how much change might be due to natural variation and how much from human intervention.
As noted by Canadian emeritus professor Jan Narveson last month, "the Kyoto Protocol — calling for major restrictions on carbon output — has the following feature: It will do no good" (http://westernstandard.ca/website/article.php?id=2753).
Yet, the cost in America alone is estimated at $200 billion per year. Because taking $200 billion from Americans' won't make any difference to the climate, this is like the government paying someone to dig a hole in the ground and then paying someone else to fill it back up.
Narveson also writes, "A public policy that imposes draconian restrictions on all of our lives in order to bring about a result like that is, to put it bluntly, completely irresponsible."
How much of a cut in CO2 emissions would it take to actually make a difference? Viscount Christopher Monckton calculates that if England decreased its human CO2 emissions enough to counterbalance the increase in CO2 from the growth of China's economy over just the next two years, all of England's industry would be shut down.
England would be reduced to Stone Age conditions, and would be much, much less healthy. This is another well-kept secret. Imagine living in a world without electricity, the Internet, vaccines, clean water, or food and where the average age at death was 17.
Another dirty secret is that there are ways to reduce global temperature directly, quickly and cheaply, rather than having to increase government power, wait 50 years, and waste trillions of dollars. Scientist Art Robinson briefly describes one such technique in Human Events earlier this year.
Robinson notes that if the climate hysterics were as "alarmed as they say about imminent climatic peril, they would be clamoring for the Penner-Teller solution. These scientists have shown that slight injections of sun-blocking particulates into the upper atmosphere would immediately erase all Earth warming of the past 200 years." Teller estimated the cost to achieve this cooler temperature at about $1 billion.
The effect would be similar to major volcanic eruptions that send ash and dust clouds high into the upper atmosphere. These clouds of tiny particles spread around the world, blocking sunlight and cooling the globe. For example, a year after Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, the dust high in the air produced "the year without summer."
Mount Pinatubo's 1991 eruption in the Philippines dropped global temperatures 0.5 degrees Celsius over the next two years, according to Pete Geddes, executive vice president of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) and an adjunct scholar for the National Center for Policy Analysis (http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=15524).
These injected particulates could be microscopic particles of benign forms of silicon dioxide or other benign minerals. Such minerals are major components of dirt.
If human CO2 production actually were a significant and solvable problem, the simplest and most efficient solution would be to put up such a global sunscreen. Instead of having to wait 50 years to produce an effect, this dusty sunscreen would produce effects immediately, as volcanic eruptions have done in the past. Further, if the world cools off too much, the effect would spontaneously resolve as the tiny particles settle out of the air.
So why do proponents keep pushing for climate control with totally ineffective CO2 emission controls? Let's look at the actual result of such controls.
As with all measures requiring more government control, politicians would have much more power. Their favored constituents, namely those who promote the these controls (such as some research scientists and academics getting money from the government) and people selling supposed CO2 offsets (such as former Vice President Al Gore) would have also have enhanced power and money, just like the hole diggers and hole fillers in the example above.
I've also exposed a really fine secret about dirt, namely that very fine dirt high in our atmosphere acts just like a sunscreen for cooling the climate. Call it "clean dirt" if you want.
Dirt would be the solution to global warming, if it were a problem worth solving.
Editor's Note: Robert J. Cihak wrote this week's column.
