Fossil fuels and global warming
Dear Editor,
In the last few years the mainstream media has fixated on all the record breaking temperatures, wildfires and recently, hurricanes. All these events supposedly due to the burning of fossil fuels! They claim an imminent global warming catastrophe looms ever closer and something drastic and Immediate must be done. I emphatically disagree!
Remember the Ice Age we learned about in school? A time when two mile thick ice sheets covered much of the northern hemisphere. We keep being told to “follow the science”. So I did. There is an excellent graph to look up on the internet titled, “Post-glacial Sea Level Rise.” It illustrates that, since the last glacial maximum (when the polar ice cap was thickest) sea levels have risen approximately 410 feet! That rise in sea level started 22,000 years ago.
A closer look at the graph reveals something else. 97% of the ocean rise happened in the first 16,000 years after the glacial ice started to melt. Why? When global warming actually began during the last ice age, there was an unimaginable amount of ice. The ice sheet covering the northern hemisphere was 12,000 feet thick in places. As global warming continued, a torrent of melt water flooded into the oceans. Sea levels rose fairly rapidly for 16 millennia. The average rate was 24.8 feet per 1000 years. This rate was more than 11 times faster than the last 6,000 years. Why did the rate of glacial meltwater flowing into the oceans slow down so much?
Because much of the worldwide glacial ice had melted. It was gone. Only glacial remnants remained, as did a warmer planet.
Those glacial remnants have continued to melt and slowly flow into the oceans ever since. A rise of only 10 to 13 feet occurred in that time. Let’s take the maximum and say 13 feet. That’s 2.17 feet (26 inches) per 1000 years, or 2.6 inches per 100 years. Basically, a couple of inches per century! The “catastrophic” sea level rise climate change proponents predict ... has been happening for the last 6,000 years!
Long before the industrial revolution and widespread use of fossil fuels, the earth had warmed enough to raise the world’s oceans over 400 feet. The “Green New Deal” is governmental policy advocated by our current administration. It’s focus is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels for everything! Then be replaced by renewables such as wind and solar. This is a radical and rapid change in energy policy driven by the manufactured fear of a global warming phenomenon which has been ongoing for several thousand years. This is a terrible and misguided national energy policy that has no consideration for long term unintended consequences.
The question is; are we really going to quickly and completely eviscerate our current, reliable, energy infrastructure? Are we going to replace it with intermittent, unpredictable and more expensive “green” energy based on a recently concocted fear of a world ending climate catastrophe? The “catastrophic” rate of sea level rise has been ongoing for the last 6,000 years. The Green New Deal is being implemented as rapidly as possible by our government. Global warming has been melting the world’s glaciers for over 20,000 years and humanity seems to have done just fine. So what’s the big hurry now?
Sincerely,