‘I’m suspicious of all this talk of global warming’

I don’t know about you (naturally!), but I’m getting more and more tired of all this talk of ‘global warming’. It pops up in the press, the television or the internet virtually every day. I’m very suspicious of the whole thing and feel it hovers somewhere between fraud and hysteria in the halls of power around not only Australia, but most of the world as well. I feel pretty sure there is a small group of people somewhere, who are standing to make a lot of money out of the fear and panic that is being generated by someone, and I’m not at all certain that the information we’re getting is the real thing.

For a start, common sense tells me that carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the most prolific gasses on earth, close behind nitrogen and well ahead of oxygen for sheer quantity, which sometimes makes me wonder why it is now so poisonous that we have to spend vast sums of money getting rid of it, or at least reducing it. After all, CO2 is the gas we all breathe out, a lungful (albeit mixed with other gasses) every second or so, something that has been happening for millions of years, though admittedly on a larger scale now, as the population of the world has grown. Trees and other plants then breathe in a lot of that CO2 and in return breathe out oxygen, a neat little balance of nature.

Another thing that makes me suspicious — the Australian government, in their wisdom say they are dismantling coal fired power stations, because burning coal is one of the major causes of global warming, again through production of CO2. All well and good, giving us cleaner air, so they tell us, and slowing down the global warming, but at a cost greater than the very cheap coal fired power stations we now use. Yet, while feeding us all this bull, they sell our coal to the Chinese and the Indians, who then burn it, in power stations nowhere near as clean burning as ours, to produce electricity for their own people. What I would like to know is — where are the net savings, if all that we are doing is moving the coal to another country to do the same things with it as we did before, but not as efficiently as us? That seems distinctly fishy to me!

Then, and I believe this to be one of the most important points in the global warming argument, we know as a scientific fact that Earth has passed through many ice ages in its long history, caused — so I’ve read — by its orbit being such that every few millions of years we get a little closer to the sun, then retreat again (an ice age!). It seems entirely logical to me that we are, at present coming out of such an ice age and creeping closer to the sun, making everything warmer, and whatever we tiny, insignificant humans do, it’s a situation we are not going alter, unless someone discovers a way of putting rocket motors on one side of Earth and switches them all on at the same time to reverse the direction of our movement. It’s easy to imagine what could happen then — yes, I’m sure you’ve guessed it — we’d most like finish up somewhere out past Saturn, and still be heading outwards from the sun!

I also read recently, in an article written by an eminent scientist (at Adelaide University, I believe), that the average erupting volcano puts out as much CO2 in a day, as we humans create in a whole year! (I’m not certain of the actual figures quoted, but it was something like this.) If it’s true, it does make you think a bit, doesn’t it!

My own final thoughts on the matter are that the best thing to do is to maintain the status quo with regard to the CO2 problem, and instead look for the alternative things we need to do, to compete with the mighty powers of nature that happen to be warming us up at the moment. Perhaps the scientists need to be looking for more food vegetables that can grow in desert-like conditions, or new ways of collecting and storing our lessening water resources, or finding more, and cheaper ways of converting the sun’s heat into energy — I think we’ve hardly broken through the surface of that little problem! I just don’t believe trying to cut down the CO2 is going to provide any answer, nor will closing down of our highly efficient and clean-burning power stations.

What are your thoughts on global warming?

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