Climate Change
Global Warming
James B. Hartline
What is the truth concerning what is called “Global Warming?” Are we really experiencing anything new? Did we have anything to do with it? Can WE fix it?
First, I am totally in favor of taking care of our God-given earth and using its resources wisely. Wasting, polluting and other acts of carelessness are shameful and just should not occur. I am also in favor of recycling where it is practical and have done it for years, myself. Unnecessary pollution of the habitat is unacceptable. This is not what "Global Warming" is really all about.
Let’s be realistic and see if we can learn more about what is really going on here. Is the earth really getting hotter? Good reputable scientists agree that the earth has warmed slightly for the past few centuries. What does man have to do with it, if anything. What can man do to fix it, if anything?
What is the history of earth temperatures and man's effects on them? Is there anything to be learned that will help us understand it better?
Interesting observations:
1925
I have a story that my father wrote for his children about his early life. He was born in 1908 in north Alabama and died there in 1982. Most summers the temperature is in the nineties in north Alabama, but dad told of a year, 1925, which, he said, was the hottest year that anyone he knew could remember.
On September 5, 1925, the temperature reached 112 degrees. He said it was so hot, for so long, that the Tennessee River, which flows through north Alabama, dried up so that he could walk all the way across the river. Horse-drawn wagons were also driven across the river, because the ferry was grounded in the mud. It was so hot that they picked cotton by moonlight and slept as much as they could in the mornings.
Being a stickler for accuracy, I checked online for information about the years he mentioned. I found him to be very accurate on all the dates, including the Spanish Flu pandemic, Small Pox epidemic and the end of WWI (exact date), and of course the date in 1925 that was the hottest period he ever experienced. September 5, 1925 is still the hottest day on record in north Alabama. That doesn’t mean that it is the highest it has ever been, just the highest since records were kept. It seems the earliest records we have are in the 1870s.
From Intellicast, “Weather for Active Lives” web page, I found a few temperature records of significance:
August 7, 1878, Denver, CO set its all-time record high of 105.
August 17, 1885, Amos, CA hit 130 to set the August U.S. record high.
September 5, 1925, Centerville, AL hit 112 degrees for a record high there.
July 10, 1913, Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, CA reached 134 degrees and was regarded as the maximum temperature reading for North America.
August 12, 1933, the temp at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, CA reached 127 degrees.
July 14, 1934, Record high for New Mexico set with 116 as measured at Oragrande.
July 19, 1960, Cow Creek, CA in Death Valley reached 126 degrees.
There are a lot of other extremely hot days, recorded from the late 1800s to now, but these records are not being exceeded today. Official records seem to only go back to 1958.
1936
It was very hot in the year that I was born, 1936, 120 degrees in Ozark, Arkansas. (I got that from records on the internet, since I was too young to observe it myself). Also see: Gainesville, GA, April 6, 1936 Tornados. This one is not funny.
The winter of 1936 was also the coldest on record. The pendulum swings.
Also, I personally observed that the Tennessee river was very much back to normal levels when I was a lad. We went there a lot to boat and fish.
I remember in 1950s that it was 110 degrees in the shade in north Alabama, for several days, maybe even weeks, in the summer. It was so hot we woke up during the night soaked with sweat. There was no air conditioning back then. This was before Al Gore invented “global warming.”
Think about this:
In 1925,
1. There were few automobiles.
2. The population of the U.S. was 115,829,000. (We hit 301,000,000 Jan. 1, 2007.)
3. The only emissions going into the atmosphere were from:
A. A few cars.
B. Coal burning locomotives.
C. Furnaces at factories.
D. Outside burning.
E. Wood burning heaters and stoves.
4. From natural causes:
A. Forest (wild) fires.
B. Volcanos.
Here's good question:
How did 115,829,000 Americans, with very few automobiles, not many trains, burning their coal heaters in the winter and using wood to stoke the fire in the kitchen stove, or cooking over a fire place, and a few factories (that did, in fact, put out some pollution), cause all that “Global Warming” back in 1925? What should we do? Go back to the life of the sixteenth century? Or back to caves?
Would the temperatures in September 1925, the highest temperatures on record in the twentieth century, qualify to be called “Global Warming?” It certainly was hotter then than it is today.
Natural variations:
Fact: For as long as temperatures have been recorded, there has always been warming and cooling. It happens every day from morning, through the heat of the day and cools again at night. It is said that there are no two snow flakes exactly alike. The same holds true for days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, etc. Weather patterns constantly reshape temperatures across the U. S. and the world. Volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and other storms also affect the temperatures. The temperature records (since the 19th century until now) show that from year-to-year and decade-to-decade there are always variations in temperature. Variations in the earth’s orbit causes variations in temperatures through the season of the years. Wind affects the distribution of temperatures. This is all natural and we can’t change it to any great extent.
We need to recognize that there are all kinds of variables that affect temperatures. The tides of the seas are affected by the moon. The seasons vary from year to year. We have some long springs and long autumns and again some are short. This is normal.
Many things in God’s eco-system are cyclical. The weather is one of those things. Heating for a period, cooling, then back to heating. This is the “natural” way it was meant to be.
Someone who doesn’t understand natural variations that have always existed might observe few records of temperatures for a relatively short period of time and come to the conclusion that something is going wrong with our ecology. This is caused by a lack of historical data. In the U.S., we have only kept temperature records for little more than 100 years. This is insufficient to establish a trend. Even if you had temperature records for the last two thousand years, you would only observe that the earth goes through cycles repeatedly and the variety of cycles is endless. To hypothesize that man is destroying the atmosphere is coming to a conclusion without sufficient data. There are those in our society that would like to blame man for everything that they perceive to be bad on the earth. To many of them, the world would be better off if man didn't exist. According to the Bible, the earth was made for man and he was told to be fruitful, multiply and fill the land and to subdue. He was also given dominion over it.
1950s-Global Cooling:
I remember in the 1950s when I was in high school, there were worries of the earth cooling so much that it would go into another Ice Age (in a few million years). We were really concerned! Now that the “ice age” scare has passed, they’re trying to scare us into spending a lot of money to try to fix something that we didn’t cause and couldn’t fix if we wanted to.
Water:
Have you ever considered that about three-fourths of the earth is covered by water and that the population of the earth is only a little over 6 billion people. Now, consider the size of the earth, compared with the atmosphere that surrounds it. The ionosphere is miles above the earth. Greenhouse gases are mostly made up of water vapor from the oceans, only a small part is from other sources, including man made emissions.
Your part of the atmosphere:
The average mass of the atmosphere is estimated to be about 5,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons.* (that varies too) A metric ton is 2,205 pounds. Divided among all 6,000,000,000 people on the earth this equals 833,333 metric tons, or 1,837,499,265 pounds of atmosphere per person. Some people are too poor to pollute the atmosphere as much as affluent Americans, but even so, I think we would all be hard pressed to even make a dent in our individual 1,837,499,265 pounds of the atmosphere.
Ozone Layer
The ozone layer is the part of the Earth's atmosphere which contains relatively high concentrations of ozone. "Relatively high" means a few parts per million - much higher than the concentrations in the lower atmosphere but still small compared to the main components of the atmosphere. It is mainly located in the lower portion of the stratosphere from approximately 15 km to 35 km above Earth's surface, though the thickness varies seasonally and geographically.
Notice: “varies seasonally and geographically.”
Ozone seems to be the main worry, although there is also concern about CO2, fluoro and hydrocarbons and greenhouse gases. Ninety per cent of ozone exists in the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, between 10 and 50 km (6-30 miles) above the earth. A layer in the stratosphere (at approximately 20 miles) contains a concentration of ozone sufficient to block most ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
Most of the information in the above paragraph and in those which follows was obtained from: NASA. Studying Earth's Environment From Space. June 2000. (accessed April 14, 2005). This was found at: http://www.bookrags.com/Ozone_layer
NOTE:
To distinguish between my comments and what I took from the above mentioned web page and other listed sites, I will Italicize my comments below.
In the case for ozone depletion, It goes on to say:
The ozone layer over the Antarctic has steadily weakened since measurements started in the early 1980s.
So the monitoring has only been done for twenty seven years. Not long enough to observe much of a cycle, but in the next paragraph, there are several variations noted:
The problem is worst over this part of the globe (Antarctic) due to the extremely cold atmosphere and the presence of polar stratospheric clouds. The land area under the ozone-depleted atmosphere increased steadily to more than 20 million sq km in the early 1990s and has varied between 20 and 29 million sq. km since then. In 2000, the area of the ozone hole reached a record 29 million sq. kilometers on 12 September 2000. Although it was the largest and the deepest ozone hole on record for the month of September, it dissipated early in October, the earliest since 1991. The lowest value recorded at the South Pole was 86 DU on 12 October 1993. This year, the area of the ozone hole has been about 25 million sq. km. While no hole has appeared elsewhere, the Arctic spring has seen the ozone layer over the North Pole thin by up to 30%, while the depletion over Europe and other high latitudes varies between 5% and 30%.
Then on the same site, there is a contradiction to that highlighted at the top of the article above to that highlighted below:
Three satellites and three ground stations confirmed that the upper atmosphere ozone depletion rate has slowed down significantly during the past decade. The study was organized by the American Geophysical Union.
Does this sound like a steady weakening?
The "thickness" of the ozone layer—that is, the total amount of ozone in a column overhead—varies by a large factor worldwide, being in general smaller near the equator and larger as one moves towards the poles. It also varies with season, being in general thicker during the spring and thinner during the autumn. The reasons for this latitude and seasonal dependence are complicated, involving atmospheric circulation patterns as well as solar intensity.
You can see all these variations (cycles) even on the sites that promote or support the idea of “global warming.” These paragraphs were copied intact from among those on the listed web site. I did add underlining to point out variations.
The ozone layer is a region of atmosphere 12-30 mi (19-48 km) above Earth's surface that consists of ozone concentrations of as much as 10 parts per million. The main function of the ozone layer is protection of Earth's surface from harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun. Although this atmospheric layer filters ultraviolet rays, the ozone layer does allow enough ultraviolet rays to pass through to support the activation of vitamin D in humans.
Do you see that? We have to have enough Ozone at 20 miles up to filter ultraviolet rays, but little enough to support the activation of vitamin D in humans.
Doesn't that tell you something? God made it so it was just right. He still keeps it balanced.
The so called holes are not really holes at all:
"Though we talk about a "hole" in the ozone layer, it's not really a hole at all, just a thin bit. Ozone is spread thinly throughout the stratosphere - and in low quantities too - if all the ozone above your head was collected together in a continuous layer, it would only be about 3-5mm (1/8 of an inch) thick.
It's better to think of the ozone as being like orange squash in a glass of water where the water is the rest of the atmosphere. When we talk about an "ozone hole" we actually mean a region where the squash is more diluted than we'd like it to be."
About 90% of the ozone in our atmosphere is contained in the stratosphere, the region from about 10 to 50 km (32,000 to 164,000 feet) above Earth's surface. Ten percent of the ozone is contained in the troposphere, the lowest part of our atmosphere where all of our weather takes place. Ozone concentrations are greatest between about 15 and 40 km, where they range from about 2 to 8 parts per million. If all of the ozone were compressed to the pressure of the air at sea level, it would be only a few millimeters thick.
Millions of meteors burn up daily in the mesosphere as a result of collisions with the gas particles contained there, leading to a high concentration of iron and other metal atoms. The collisions almost always create enough heat to burn the falling objects long before they reach the ground.
Question: Where do the heat, residue and gases from these meteors go? Heat rises.
The following web page explains that Forest fires increase the warming of the earth these paragraphs are extracted intact from a rather long page. To read it all go to:
What Effects do Forest Fires have on the Storage of Carbon?
By Tania Peñafort
Forests and the Global Carbon Cycle:
The hypothesis that has been created for this study states that the unburned site will significantly store more carbon than the burned site. Other research has concluded that when something is burned, the carbon stored in it is released. When we burn wood, coal and petroleum products we are releasing the sun’s energy that was trapped long ago by photosynthesis. (Kraus, Concepts in Modern Biology)
As glucose is burned, it oxidizes creating a new gas called carbon dioxide (CO2). Photosynthesis on land -- most of which is accomplished by the leaves and needles of trees -- removes CO2 from the atmosphere at the prodigious rate of about 60 Gt. C/yr., worldwide (Kasting, 1996) and simultaneously stores carbon.
An increase in CO2 means an increase in the warming of the Earth. This is known as the green house effect. Now that we know that a forest fire contributes to the release of carbon, which once meeting the atmosphere will turn into CO2, and that this increase in CO2 traps the heat radiating from our earth, we can link this knowledge to global climate change.
Note that this CO2 is from Forest Fires.
In the summer of 2007 we have had vast and numerous forest fires in the Southeast and in the Western U.S. In past years, there have been many huge forests that have burned in CA and elsewhere.
Conclusions:
It appears to me that natural occurrences such as forest fires, volcanos, storms, greenhouse gases that occur naturally from water evaporating from the oceans etc. have much more effect on earth temperatures than our man-made emissions.
According to one precipitation scientist, the amount of rainfall on the earth is directly proportional to the amount of evaporation from the ocean. The distribution of rainfall is due to other natural factors such as wind and atmospheric pressure systems that sometime stall for long times over certain areas of the earth. (Case in point, that system stalled over Texas for a long period which brought a normal years rainfall in only a few days. June 2007).
What I Learned:
I learned a lot from my research, but, admitting that I am no expert on this subject, I am still convinced that humans haven’t had a significant effect on either the earth’s temperature, ozone layer, hydrocarbon, CO2, greenhouse gases or its weather patterns.
If you want to get people stirred up about something, pick a subject that most people know little about and one on which there is not much available data. This is sure to cause a lot of concern. Then, if you claim to know more about it than anyone else, you can be the hero who discovered it. It also helps to get a large number of others that know little about it on your side. Birds of a feather. . . safety in numbers. . .
There have always been forest fires caused by lightning. Who knows how much forest burned in antiquity and how much pollution it put into the atmosphere? When those fires started, there was no one to extinguish them. There are numerous volcanic eruptions recorded in history. Some were so large that the air was darkened for thousands of miles. This caused cooling of the areas near the eruptions. To maintain the balance of nature on the earth, it is necessary for cycles of warming and cooling, rain and drought and storms, flooding, etc. to occur. We can worry about it, but it serves no purpose. We can’t fix it.
As someone said, “This too shall pass.”
James B. Hartline
I've noticed recently that some of the weather channels on TV have espoused global warming and are spouting off about it as if it is a real factor. Al Gore has even dragged in some teenager help to have them teach it in schools. This is disgraceful. It's as big a hoax as the "y2k" crisis that (as I had predicted) never amounted to anything. Let them play their games, we don't have to partake of it. Study it for yourselves and you will likely agree with me, its a no-brainer.
*According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Additional reading:
Interesting ECD web site:
Shows how volcanic eruptions affect ozone layer:
Effects of forest fires on atmospheric temperature:
Weather scientist questions records:
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