Vanities of the Warmists

From the American Thinker. Jon Caruthers does an outstanding job of detailing why we should not become engaged in carbon credits even though these words never appear in his article. He begins the article with a history lesson from Yellowstone National Park and government interference.

When Yellowstone National Park was first created, park officials believed they had to “save” the native fauna as well as protect the visitors by killing off the native wolf population. This they did in grand form. Additionally, they noticed the yearly occurrences of wildfires which, according to the then “modern” and “progressive” thought of the day, should be stamped out at all cost. The net result of these notions was that 110 years or so later half the park burned down. It turns out that without the wolves the ruminants ran wild and ate up the deciduous trees, leaving only the pine trees to go forth and multiply. Anyone who’s started a campfire knows what happens when you compound this with 110 years of pine needles and flotsam and jetsam -- you end up with the perfect firestorm. This is nothing natural. This situation was created by us -- by human intervention into a formerly pristine ecosystem that was supposedly “managed” by the federal government – and the result was that half the park burned down.

When discussing the Atlantic Conveyor Belt and melting glaciers, he makes two very salient points. One, the Earth is a rather stable ecosystem and the negative feedback situation that exists with climate.

It’s all about negative feedback. The earth is a stable system, if it weren’t life would have disappeared billions of years ago. It’s the negative feedback that makes life possible in the first place -- if things get out of whack, there’s a system for getting them back to normality. If the Gulf Stream fades, Arctic winds will sink south and cover Greenland, thereby cooling the island and stopping the glacial melt -- thus stopping the runaway insanity of the eco-warriors’ worst nightmares.

He goes on to discuss the carbon dioxide/oxygen conversion process and how little we know about the the systems which control this process.

Despite what the “experts” may say, consumption, as described above, is completely unknown. Look into the field of metagenomics. Scientists discovered that if they sampled sand from one area of a beach near Torrey Pines, they discovered literally hundreds of thousands of new species of organisms. Even more surprising, if they moved the probe one meter right or left they discovered hundreds of thousands more species as unrelated to the original crop as we are to the original crop. In short, we have no idea -- not even remotely -- of the number of species on the planet, and how many of those are consuming greenhouse gasses, and how many are producing the stuff. Since we have no idea of how much of a given gas is being consumed or produced, the estimates going into those models are only that -- estimates -- and eat away at the efficacy of the model (as again, it’s all about accuracy).

His ending paragraph wraps his insightful article up completely.

The result is that we’re trying to base policy on flawed models that are no better than ancient shamans reading tea leaves. The enviro-nazis are no better than the medicine man of lineage ancient during a lunar eclipse who could claim that the great night spirit was eating the moon goddess, and if only the tribal elders would hand over the virgins he’d perform his incantations and make him spit her out again.

I, like most people, believe we should be as clean and environmentally aware as economically possible. We now do not allow dumping of toxic chemicals into lakes which is a good thing and lakes are coming back as a response. We create more efficient cars, lessening toxic output. Again, this is another good thing as it limits pollutants and makes sitting at stoplights a much more pleasant experience than in the 70s. However, the audacity that we can somehow control minor temperature fluctuations with carbon credits is as absurd as how we thought we could keep Yellowstone National Park in its constant pristine condition as when it was declared a national park. It is just as absurd as his last paragraph when shamans thought sacrificing virgins would keep volcanoes from erupting.

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