Blame it on global warming!

It’s today’s catchphrase, the blame-this-for-everything, whenever we get a bit of cold weather, a bit of warm weather, a bit of a drought or a bit of a flood! And we’re told, again and again, by scientists, politicians, astrologers and experts in the life cycle of the domestic dog, that it’s all OUR fault! We call it global warming!

Now I’m just a lowly, ignorant example of the human race and I’m sure my ideas don’t count for much, but deep down I can’t help feeling a tiny twinge of suspicion about this. The world is a much bigger place than the sum total of the people living on it and it has been here much longer than us, (even the experts admit that, imagining the total time the world has existed on a twelve hour clock, we didn’t appear until about two minutes to midnight). The old girl has managed to satisfactorily manoeuvre itself through countless ‘situations’ in the billions of years it has been in existence and always returned to normal eventually, like the disaster that killed off the dinosaurs, possibly a large meteor which hit the Earth and caused drastic changes to the climate, with the air full of dust for several eons. So I always feel we are being just a little arrogant, claiming all this warming for ourselves.

There are several facts to be considered here, the first of which is that we are told we are still in the process of coming out of the last ice-age, one of several that have occurred, and in each case, so the experts contend, the world has gone from being almost literally covered in ice, to a state where there was virtually no ice left at all; apparently we are at present about half way between these extremes and headed towards the warm end of the trip (it occurs to me to wonder if it wasn’t a meteor, but one of these ice ages that wiped out the dinosaurs, but I’m no expert!).

Next there’s all this fuss about carbon dioxide, a completely natural gas, one of the most common there is and one we ourselves add to the atmosphere every time we breathe out, counterbalanced by the trillions of trees with which our planet abounds, all of them sucking up the gas as hard as they can, every night, and turning it into solid carbon in the form of wood! I would accept the fact that we are now pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than used to occur naturally before man came along, but ever since we have been here we have added to the total without too much apparent harm being caused – think of Victorian factories and whole cities, each with a fireplace burning coal, a disgusting and harmful thing for the bosses of that time to do, with no thought for anything but their own profits! To put it in some sort of perspective, a top scientist wrote recently that a fairly average active volcano puts as much CO2, ash and dust into the atmosphere in a day, as we humans insert in about a month! And yet we still find a lot of the world coated in a glorious green colour, indicating where the carbon is being caught and stored – as I said, the ball we live on is very good at looking after itself.

Yes, I’m sure there is global warming going on, but not because of us, it’s a natural phenomenon and it’s going to continue until Mother Earth reaches her optimum high temperature and starts back towards the next ice age, in a process that may take several million years, so I doubt we shall see a full cycle!

As I indicated near the beginning of this article, I am well aware that I am an ignorant old man, who claims no special knowledge – I simply wrote this little piece to see what other ideas our wonderful readers can come up with, to explain what is going on.

Share your thoughts below.