Hi Al [Gore] my friend. You thought that you would be reading about your book or movie here and you are right! But this may be An Inconvenient Truth for you.
Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect. What fun. So is the world warming up? The northern hemisphere is at this time of year. But that is an annual cyclic thing. Further temperature fluctuation are in cycles. Over the past 100 years or so we have seen decades of increasing temperatures and decades of decreasing. Over the past 20 years the average temperature of the world has stayed pretty constant. (see: http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/02.htm – I myself doubt the validity of the data past 10,000 years or so but just in case you are an old earth believer).
“But what about the ice cap? It is melting!” Really? It looks to me that data collected via satellite over the Antarctic and Greenland indicate that on the average it is increasing! See: http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMILF638FE_planet_0.html
“Ok, but we are driving cars and producing tons of CO2 which is a greenhouse gas!” Yes we are driving cars and producing CO2 and yes, it is a greenhouse gas. However, 95% or so of greenhouse gas is plain old water vapour which is very natural. 4.2% of the remaining is CO2 and a majority of that is natural too. An interesting fact on this is that naturally occurring CO2 absorbs most if not all the infra-red radiation which assists in the so called “greenhouse” effect. So we add more CO2. How can this effect temperature if all the radiation is already absorbed. More CO2 can’t absorb more if there is none to absorb. However, more CO2 will move the absorbsion band in the atmosphere closer to the surface of the earth and causing a localized temperature increase. See: http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
The method of temperature sampling is also suspect. Collected data tends to be biased toward more densely populated areas and because of the effect mentioned above, the temperature will tend to rise LOCALLY.
Ok, all stop there and give two options to save the planet:
1) Remove or prevent objects that emit greenhouse gasses from doing so. You can do this by removing swimming pools and covering any source of moisture to prevent the water vapour from getting to the atmosphere. Covering ponds, rivers, oceans, glaciers, ice caps, etc. Also, remove CO2 emitters. Vehicles are a small source with larger sources being mammals such as cattle and other live stock (this is ok because vegan is not so bad). Again this is only partial solution. All wildlife would have to be destroyed and Al Gore would have to stop breathing (all the greenhouse politicking may be doing it).
2) The other option would be to take care of the earth in a reasonable manor and realize that this is probably a natural cycle. If not, we will be able to evolve to handle it like we did before (that is for the old earth people).
God has provided us with an earth to take care of and we have the responsibility to do that. However, we are to subdue the earth not the earth control us. He has provided us with minds and resources to do the things we do, just be careful how we use them.
