Typical of many three-year-olds, my son loves dinosaurs.
Almost since he could speak he has called the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, "my museum." He has a big box full of plastic triceratops and T-rexes, and a stack of dino books nearly as tall as he is.
I have learned three things from his pediatric paleontology texts: Dinosaurs were huge, they ate a lot of plants, and they lived at time when the world was much warmer than it is now.
Not all dinosaurs were large, of course. Still, there were plenty of 12-ton behemoths, daily consuming their own weight in leaves and grass, a diet that was possible only because the much warmer temperatures of the era permitted vast, verdant jungles to thrive nearly everywhere.
Hey, wait a minute! What was that?
Enormous herds of herbivorous reptiles survived only because extremely warm global temperatures spurred the rapid growth of the plants that were their principal food.
Hmm, I see what you mean. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for over 100 million years because the hotter temperatures of their time ensured they had enough food to eat. Perhaps global warming wouldn’t be a disaster. Perhaps it could be a good thing. Certainly the scientists of the Greening Earth Society (www.greeningearthsociety.org) think so.
I’m not going to start extolling the virtues of global warming just yet, if only because I’m a melanin-challenged redhead who is content with his current annual allotment of sunburns. However, contrary to the homogeneity of press reports on the subject, it is far from certain that global warming would mean the end of life on earth (a frequent claim of environmentalists), or even cause appreciable harm to the environment.
With the heat and drought being suffered along the eastern seaboard of the United States this summer, and the sustained high temperatures in central Canada, it was inevitable that global warming scaremongering would increase.
If all politics is local, so is all weather. If it is hot and dry in New York and Washington, and steamy in Toronto, it is natural for network television producers and politicians to assume its is hot and dry and steamy everywhere. And since most people understandably confuse weather and climate, it is also natural producers and politicians would believe these conditions are the harbingers of climate disaster.
Let’s assume for a moment the Earth is warming up. It likely is not (the most comprehensive and precise measurements of worldwide temperatures -- the array of eight NASA weather satellites -- show no appreciable warming over the past 20 years), but let’s pretend it is.
A demonstrable rise in global temperatures is but one of three preconditions needed to justify drastic government regulation of industry and the economy in the name of environmental protection. If there is no temperature rise, there is no need to worry. But even if a rise is occurring, the second precondition would be convincing evidence that the rise would lead to disastrous rather than neutral or beneficial outcomes.
The third requirement would be proof that such a rise was man-made. If the rise were natural in origin, regardless of how drastic and detrimental it would be, all the emission controls and carbon taxes in the world would be powerless to prevent it.
The global warming fanatics believe they have proof enough to satisfy all these conditions. They love to repeat the conclusion of the 1995 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that stated "the balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate," even though the UN had to doctor the report (it censored three scientific statements casting doubt on man as the source of the warming) and drop dissenting scientists from the panel in order to arrive at that conclusion.
But it is increasingly unclear whether the climate is warming, despite the weather news this summer, just as it is unclear that any warming would lead to the planet to ruin.
What’s more, there has been a recent glut of evidence to suggest that even if the earth is about to stew in its own atmosphere, the sun is to blame, not car exhausts and coal-fired power plants.
In the past year, Theodor Landscheidt at Nova Scotia’s Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, and Eugene Parker of the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research at the University of Chicago, plus other scientists at Columbia University, Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford and in Europe have all reached the conclusion that changes in sunspots, solar winds and solar brightening could account for all of the global warming this century.
The British study, released this spring, estimates the sun’s magnetic field is 40 greater than in 1964, and 2.3 times greater than at the turn of the century.
Before we let the weather and the rhetoric of environmentalists panic us, we would do well to hang signs reading "Psst...It’s the sun," in every newsroom and political office in the country.
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