Great Minds Think Alike

Two authors have taken their cue from last Wednesday’s post about CO2 (ahem!). The American Thinker wrote about a recent study proving that trees grow bigger the more CO2 is around. Even during the Dark Ages when I was in middle school, we learned about photosynthesis, the process whereby plants turn CO2 into oxygen for men and animals to breath. In return when we exhale CO2, the plants thrive and grow bigger. So, just exactly why did the tree huggers decide that CO2 was a dangerous substance that must be controlled to save us all from extinction?

Oh yes, I remember, it’s global warming. It’s just so hard to consider the whole global warming shtick when I shiver even while wearing a wool sweater and jacket on April 7 in Atlanta, GA. Besides, Richard Lindzen, a professor of metereology at MIT has concluded, “The earth's climate ... is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. [That is, stabilizing self-regulation.] Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself.”

Then on Monday Dr. Tim Ball insisted that the IPCC’s (UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) claim that CO2 has caused the global warming problem is totally wrong. He avers that sun spots, or lack thereof, cause the warming and cooling trends. Like others, he claims that the computer models used to predict CO2 as the agent of climate change are too simplistic to be reliable.

Fifty years ago H. L. Mencken insisted, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”