2008 Woodie Awards
Skeptics should re-examine global warming
Keith David Smeltz
Issue date: 3/6/08 Section: Opinion
The Collegio recently printed a column by Brady Turley about global warming ('Auto industry will suffer for clean car debate,' Feb. 21) and a letter in the following issue by Jake McLaughlin complimenting him on it.
Brady Turley opens with a story about people getting excited on the Internet but never says why Bob Lutz's words should be relevant. Some random CEO with more dollars than sense says something silly and then has to explain what he really meant.
Amusing story aside, there's nothing to see here. He spends half his column on this?
"... how many of you out there believe in global warming?" What kind of question is this? The world is getting warmer much faster than what is normal during warming times. The atmosphere's CO2 content has been quickly increasing for at least 50 years (NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Mauna Loa Observatory).
Bubbles of air in ice core samples reveal the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was falling slowly for the last 500,000 years until very recently. Humanity is dumping large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the sixth great extinction on record. None of these facts are in dispute and this is not a matter of belief.
The only controversy about anthropogenic global warming is what to do about it.
Freeman Dyson says we should build personal wealth through deregulation, the typical libertarian solution. The greens prefer taxation of carbon-positive fuels, or the buying of credits to allow emissions. The bright greens say we should increase efficiency with clever engineering. As far as I know, they may all be right. Even Dyson has a point - free trade would allow me to buy foreign cars with MPGs unavailable in the States.
McLaughlin chimes in with a couple of nice mistakes (though surely he was just being poetic when he talked about dinosaur farts). Let me remind all and sundry that there were no dinosaurs 3 million years ago, that we are discovering new oil resources at a pace far short of the burn rate, that the problem is not warming but the short time over which the amount of warming is happening, and that oil by market definition deserves the money it costs.
Brady Turley opens with a story about people getting excited on the Internet but never says why Bob Lutz's words should be relevant. Some random CEO with more dollars than sense says something silly and then has to explain what he really meant.
Amusing story aside, there's nothing to see here. He spends half his column on this?
"... how many of you out there believe in global warming?" What kind of question is this? The world is getting warmer much faster than what is normal during warming times. The atmosphere's CO2 content has been quickly increasing for at least 50 years (NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Mauna Loa Observatory).
Bubbles of air in ice core samples reveal the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was falling slowly for the last 500,000 years until very recently. Humanity is dumping large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the sixth great extinction on record. None of these facts are in dispute and this is not a matter of belief.
The only controversy about anthropogenic global warming is what to do about it.
Freeman Dyson says we should build personal wealth through deregulation, the typical libertarian solution. The greens prefer taxation of carbon-positive fuels, or the buying of credits to allow emissions. The bright greens say we should increase efficiency with clever engineering. As far as I know, they may all be right. Even Dyson has a point - free trade would allow me to buy foreign cars with MPGs unavailable in the States.
McLaughlin chimes in with a couple of nice mistakes (though surely he was just being poetic when he talked about dinosaur farts). Let me remind all and sundry that there were no dinosaurs 3 million years ago, that we are discovering new oil resources at a pace far short of the burn rate, that the problem is not warming but the short time over which the amount of warming is happening, and that oil by market definition deserves the money it costs.
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