{"id":50,"date":"2009-07-30T23:32:32","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T05:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/?p=50"},"modified":"2009-07-30T23:32:32","modified_gmt":"2009-07-31T05:32:32","slug":"on-global-warming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/?p=50","title":{"rendered":"On Global Warming"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Global Warming<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee Barron<\/p>\n

There is a standard in human logic that is very helpful in determining what to believe about a theory or event \u2026<\/p>\n

Occam\u2019s Razor \u2013<\/p>\n

It asserts, \u201c The best answer to a complex problem is the simplest.\u201d\u00a0 This could be more accurately stated as follows \u2013 \u201cone should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Man has struggled for millennia to understand the natural phenomena around him.\u00a0 In ancient times the unknown was explained by seers and witches.\u00a0 Slowly, man tried to explain these things, first by logic and then, with the Enlightenment beginning about 1300 A.D., by the close observation and experimentation that has led to the Scientific Method that has made possible our modern society.\u00a0 Today, most of the mysteries of nature have been probed and, to a large extent understood by those who care to invest the time to understand.\u00a0 However, if some problem is not completely understood, mankind, who as a species has not evolved much from his superstitious forefathers from a very few hundred years ago, often intellectually backslides to their superstitions.\u00a0 He casts aside science and logic and embraces the unholy assertions of modern day witches and seers who reject reasoned answers for the fantastic.<\/p>\n

Think of the travesties of justice and common logic that have taken place in the near past that we, today, all abhor.\u00a0 The Catholic Church coercing Galileo into recanting his great discoveries on pain of the Inquisition; or the Protestant witch trials based upon the hysterical testimony of teen aged girls in 17 th Century Salem, Massachusetts; or the WW II Nazi assertions of Arian supremacy.\u00a0\u00a0 We tend to react to an unknown problem like the chicken Aesop\u2019s fable.\u00a0 Is it possible that if something falls out of the sky and hits you on the head that it is more likely an acorn than the sky itself?\u00a0 It seems to me that modern society, when confronted with a new problem would much rather listen to the modern day demagogic \u201cchicken littles\u201d than to search for the more likely answers.\u00a0 It is easier to blame the ubiquitous \u201cTHEY\u201d and \u201cTHEM\u201d (like the automobile or oil companies), even though we personally support them in their rapaciousness, because the conclusion supports prejudices that we have gained from misinformation.<\/p>\n

Is it possible that the hole in the ozone layer is manifestation of some mechanism other than man made chloro-flouro carbons?\u00a0 Is it possible that \u201cglobal warming\u201d is caused by something other than the interference of man?\u00a0 Certainly!!!\u00a0 Use your head.\u00a0 Remember all that studying that you did when you were taking chemistry and physics.\u00a0 Remember the Laws of Nature that were revealed to you for your inquisitiveness and effort.\u00a0 Use the understanding of the Universe that God began to reveal to us when our forefathers rejected conjecture, feelings and hearsay for the methods of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Method.\u00a0 Our studies of nature have made us privy to the plan of the Creator and the wisdom of the ages and that wisdom does not include witchcraft.<\/p>\n

When studying about man\u2019s effect on the Earth, its atmosphere and its weather, we must define the problem.\u00a0 First, the Earth compared to man, is infinitely large.\u00a0 The mass of the atmosphere is enormous.\u00a0 The atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, leaving 1% for all other gases.\u00a0 It is a little known fact that there is 25 times more Argon in the atmosphere than CO2.<\/sub> Most of the carbon on the Earth is not in the atmosphere, nor plants or animals, nor coal or oil or natural gas.\u00a0 70 % of all the carbon on Earth is in rock, limestone.\u00a0 Most of that limestone, CaC03<\/sub> was once a shell covering a living animal that got the carbon for his shell from the atmosphere.\u00a0 Is it possible that there was once much more carbon in the atmosphere?<\/p>\n

It is a scientific fact that the amount of CO2<\/sub> in the atmosphere has risen 10% in the last century and a half.\u00a0 This is only logical when we consider the amount of fossil fuels that man has used in that period of time.\u00a0 The amount has therefore risen from 0.03% in 1850 to 0.033% presently, indicating that the amount will rise to 0.04% in the year 2250.\u00a0 Now considering that the amount of this gas is many times greater in a point source like the City of Los Angeles, very unpleasant I admit, but I would point out, tolerable.\u00a0\u00a0 Why isn\u2019t this city uninhabitable if tiny amounts of CO2<\/sub> cause massive warming?<\/p>\n

It is interesting to reflect that all life on Earth, both plant and animal, depends upon this minute amount of the atmosphere.\u00a0 Plants depend upon CO2<\/sub> for photosynthesis – it is what they breathe, as we all learned in grade school.\u00a0 All animals are parasites of plants, ultimately depending on them for their food.\u00a0 Both plants and animals are carbon-based organisms.\u00a0 Animals exhale CO2<\/sub> because they metabolize the sugars gleaned from their food, from plants or plant eaters.\u00a0 The oxidizing of the hydrocarbons of their plant food diet generates the energy necessary for life.\u00a0 Any farmer can attest that after a plant crop is harvested that the residue, stubble, stalks or the like, must be addressed.\u00a0 If the farmer wants to accelerate the process, he simply burns the residue.\u00a0 The fire turns the residue into CO2<\/sub> and H2<\/sub>O, sending water vapor and the CO2<\/sub> back into the atmosphere \u2026 a natural cycle.\u00a0 However, the residue, in the form of hay or grain can be eaten by animals, where part of the carbon is exhaled and the balance turned into manure.\u00a0 The manure being a hydrocarbon is further decomposed by bacteria, which turn it into \u2026 you guessed it \u2026 into CO2<\/sub> and H2<\/sub>O.\u00a0 If the stubble is left in the field, bacteria, again, do their duty, just as they do to a tree fallen in the forest.\u00a0 Any plant or animal process is part of the CO2<\/sub> \u2013 biological process, in perfect balance in nature.\u00a0 There is no pollution from live animals or ingested or decaying plants.\u00a0 They and what they eat came from the atmosphere and there they will return.<\/p>\n

Many environmentalists rail about de-forestation.\u00a0 When tropical forests are cut down, it is not to a desert, but to grassland.\u00a0 Is it possible that the grass is responsible for more photosynthesis than the cut trees?\u00a0 It is extremely possibly so!\u00a0 No one will defend deforestation, but it does not follow that doing so is responsible for global warming.\u00a0 Again, this problem is spatial in scope.\u00a0 The amount of deforestation of the Amazon, for instance, although a large number of acres, is infinitesimally small compared to size of the forest.\u00a0 It took 9 years for a jet airplane flying at near sonic speed to map the Amazon basin.<\/p>\n

It is true that there is global warming.\u00a0 It is a matter of proven geological fact that a continental ice sheet covered all of North America clear to the outskirts of Chicago, through the Great Lakes, all of Canada, all of Northern Europe and Asia, as recently as 10,000 B.C.\u00a0 One of your great grandparents probably saw it in Europe.\u00a0 The ice likewise affected the Southern hemisphere.\u00a0 Since then the ice has been retreating toward the North and South Poles.\u00a0 Remnants at high altitude in the mountains although isolated, are also inexorably disappearing.\u00a0 Sea levels are rising at a rate less than a foot per century, but rising nevertheless.\u00a0 Any competent geologist will tell you that this is happening and will tell that this has happened many times in the past, about once every 100,000 years for the last 1,000,000 years.\u00a0 Probably for a much longer time than that.\u00a0 If he is over 50, he will tell you that he was taught that the ice will be coming back soon, and all things being equal, it is.\u00a0 The true climatological story is that the ice is deepening in interior Greenland and Antarctica.\u00a0 In the view of many, a little warming would be quite beneficial to the survival of the human race.\u00a0 Much of the Earth\u2019s land surface is desert.\u00a0 Maybe with the rains coincident with global warming the deserts would green up making them more like the Earth was before the ice ages began to kill off much of the forest and many of the millions of now dead species.\u00a0 There was a time in Earth\u2019s history when large animals roamed from northern Canada and Alaska to near the South Pole and the forests were dense enough to form enormous coalfields.\u00a0 There is a country in Europe, Holland, where about a third of the country has been reclaimed from the ocean.\u00a0 Would the people of the US be able to cope with a sea level rise of a foot or two per century?\u00a0 If not, could they relocate?\u00a0 Would there still be a lot of land left for them to live on?\u00a0 How would our country handle an ice age?\u00a0 The answer is that global warming is less to be feared than global cooling.\u00a0 The facts are that no one really knows what the long-term weather patterns will be.\u00a0 The facts are that mankind will meet the challenge as it is forced to, as it always has.<\/p>\n

Going back to Occam\u2019s Razor, is it more likely that global warming, a phenomenon going on for 10,000 years, is due to the amount of CO2 in<\/sub> the atmosphere rising 0.003% in 150 years or from the Sun putting out more energy cyclically every 100, 000 years?\u00a0 There could be other answers, but the answer is not to stop human progress because \u2026 \u201cthe sky is falling.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is ludicrous and unbelievably arrogant for man to presume that he is powerful enough to affect the weather in any meaningful way.\u00a0 Consider the enormity of the Earth and Atmosphere, where all life depends upon 0.033% of that atmosphere.\u00a0 Mankind is a species that is a miniscule part of the animal kingdom.\u00a0 The mass of the lowly ant on the planet far exceeds the mass of mankind.\u00a0 It is reliably estimated that there are 10 million ants for every human; the total biomass of ants could be as much as \u00bc of all the living matter on Earth.<\/p>\n

It is also logically reprehensible to subscribe to the unproved thesis that man\u2019s burning of fossil carbon is responsible for the changing of the planet\u2019s climate when global warming has been going on for at least a million years.\u00a0 Is it possible that the leaders of the environmental movement who promote the idea of mankind\u2019s culpability have an agenda of fright to sustain themselves in their well-paid positions?\u00a0 Do we have the will, education and intelligence to consider the real cause of our plight or will we let the \u201cbig bad wolf\u201d of anti-intellectual, anti-scientific witchcraft stifle human progress?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Global Warming Lee Barron There is a standard in human logic that is very helpful in determining what to believe about a theory or event \u2026 Occam\u2019s Razor \u2013 It asserts, \u201c The best answer to a complex problem … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51,"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}