Global Warming--All CO2 is not the same

Monday, April 16, 2007
All CO2 is not the same.

The following has nothing to do with autoimmune. Sorry. It is an editorial I wrote to our local newspaper today after reading an online article which was followed by online comments from readers. The online comments shocked me. The article was about Carbon Offsets. The URL is as follows:

http://nctimes.com/articles/2007/04/16/news/top_stories/19_35_374_15_07.txt

I believe that the loss of objectiviy and clarity about scientific issues is one of the main reasons we do not have autoimmune cures today (see my fetal stem cell blog). Global warming has been deliberately contrived as a controversy and a political debate. It is another area where we in America have been mislead.

Here are my comments on the article:

Con radio hosts and Fox News hosts tell us that we all breathe out CO2. Since CO2 is the greenhouse gas problem that environmental wackos whine about, they must want us to all stop breathing.

Keep breathing.

The CO2 you exhale is part of the normal carbon cycle. You remember the carbon cycle from elementary school. Animals breathe out CO2; then plants, in the presence of sunlight, absorb and combine it with water to make carbohydrates (food). Animals then eat those plants converting the carbohydrates back to CO2 to be breathed back into the atmosphere.

Around and around the carbon flows with no net carbon gain to the system. At least that was the case until about 150 years ago when we started burning fossil sources of carbon. First coal and then oil was burned.

Today fossil carbon is being released into the atmosphere in massive unprecedented quantities. This fossil carbon from coal and oil has been sequestered in deposits in the earth since the Carboniferous age that ended 280 million years ago. For almost 300 million years it has not been in the atmosphere. It has not been part of the carbon cycle.

The only CO2 to be worried about is this long buried fossil CO2. It is the culprit in global warming.

The talking heads have filled many of you with contempt for global warming and for Al Gore. These hosts are often paid under the table as "persons of influence" to change the way you think. It is a kind of payola. They are given money if they repeat misinformation about global warming. The American Petroleum Institute, funded largely by Exxon/Mobile, is the largest contributor of global warming payola to various talking heads and the corporations that employ them.

The tone of the internet comments following the on-line article in yesterday’s NCT article about carbon offsets proves how successful the strategy of paying persons of influence to change public opinion has been.

You should also know that heat and temperature are quite different concepts. Paid con radio hosts regularly mix the two concepts on purpose to confuse you.

Here is the difference. One drop of boiling water has a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit but has very little heat. Drop it on your hand and you are hardly hurt if at all because there is so little heat. Jump into a swimming pool of the same temperature and you are dead in seconds. The 212 degree swimming pool contains a massive, deadly amount of heat even though it is the same temperature as the drop of water.

The swimming pool is far larger, so contains far more heat. The larger the volume of the heated substance, the more heat it can absorb. It is like having bigger and bigger sponges.

Our atmosphere is far bigger than a pool. It is one of the largest heat sponges on earth. When its temperature rises one degree, the increased heat that one degree represents is colossal.

Heat drives the weather engine. The more heat in the atmosphere the greater the power of storms. Added heat also greatly increases the swings in extreme weather (hot and cold). These bouts of extreme weather are beginning to be out of the bounds of the norms our farmers and their crops have adapted to for the last ten thousand years. When crops cannot survive neither can we or our children.

Global warming is a dire threat to every living person on earth today.