Global warming - forget the hype

The current global warming excitement and in particular the carbon trading scheme idea are dubious at best.

Certainly the case for global warming would not hold up in a law court when the facts are presented.

The CO2 being released now has been sequestered over millions of years by plants and plankton (coal and oil/gas).

This is not manmade CO2, just recycled CO2 from times passed when the CO2 in the atmosphere was many times (~100 times) higher than the 0.034 per cent currently in the air. Methane (major source is cattle) is 20 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and water vapor 100 times higher still.

But the pundits and politicians have grabbed onto CO2 as some sort of solvable (reducible) thing that will effect a big quick change in the global temperature system, but at a very high price.

Here in Australia there is much talk about "clean coal" (I did research on that in the 1970s) and conversion to gas as "less polluting".

Electrical generating stations burning coal do so by burning finely pulverized coal (about like burning a spray of liquid or a continuous dust explosion) with exhaust filters so there are very little particulates.

What is not discussed is how burning anything is going to make a difference.

After all it takes XXX tons of water converted to steam to spin the electrical generator turbine to make YYY megawatts of electricity.

The more efficient the combustion to boil that water is (the whole idea) the more CO2 is emitted (neglecting other gases).

Perfect combustion of carbon yields only CO2 and H2O (diamonds [pure carbon] just disappear in a laboratory furnace).

The current global warming cycle (yes, it comes and goes) began over 200 years ago at the end of the "little ice age" (the Thames froze during winter of 1739/40), long before a significant Industrial Revolution.

Hard data from fossils shows major temperature cycles every 400,000 years going back 1.2 billion years and minor variations more frequently.

Looking back, there was a global cooling scare in the 1970s.

In fact, 2006 had exactly the average global temperature of the past 2000 years.

So forget the hype and look at the real facts for yourself (see John Coleman the founder of the Weather Channel at http://www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a).

If you buy into global warming and the carbon trading scheme scam, you and your great great grand children will be paying the bill.

Email, 19 Jan 2010 Tim Bard, Phegan's Bay