Radical Environmentalism – Is Global Warming A Bad Thing? (Part 8)

I’ve written before that the claim that the earth is warming is dubious at best. Much scientific evidence is suddenly emerging that shows that the reverse may actually be true.

In an unusual step for me, though, I’m going to assume for the moment that the earth is really warming, and that man may be the biggest contributor (more than sunspot changes, El Niño, and other phenomena). Here I go – flipping on the big global warming switch. The next question I would ask is this – if the average temperature of the globe went up a degree or two, would it be a good thing or a bad thing?

Arguments have been made that the shift will cause enough melting of the polar ice caps to bring about a global sea level rise that would affect us negatively. Al Gore, in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, did a masterful job of scaring everyone with this very scenario.

But some evidence given by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows something different. See http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/1997/970109.htm?pf=1 The DOA conducted a study in which they grew grain sorghum and soybeans in an artificial environment with twice the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere today (the study claims that at current CO2 rate increases, we will double the current amount in the next century). Their expectation was that yield would drop by as much as ten percent.

Instead, the increased CO2 levels caused the plant leaves to grow larger. Without using any additional fertilizer to help the plants, the soybean production was increased by thirty five percent! Sorghum yields from plants placed in the high CO2 environment were up eighteen percent.

My point : the global warming scare is just that, a scare put on by people who know that they can fool some of the people all of the time. Many people operate under the incorrect thinking that any change from the current standard must carry bad consequences along with it. Their deep-seated thinking is that the world is operating under ideal circumstances right now – that any deviation, whether it be hotter or colder temperatures, or more or less CO2 in the atmosphere - must bring negative results to mankind.

The study cited above shows that food shortages could be made much better by increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Put more succinctly, world hunger could be solved by increasing our carbon footprint. At what cost, you ask? Would we melt polar ice caps and cause the oceans to rise by two feet? Maybe – though this is still speculative. Would curing world hunger be worth it? The tradeoff between rising oceans and more crop production would need to be weighed – if human-caused global warming is even a fact (it’s still highly speculative). The purpose of this whole analogy is to demonstrate that we do not necessarily live in a perfect world right now, where everything is working at optimum efficiency. When changes happen, some things will get better and some will get worse. Where is the ideal point that we should live?

Okay – having made the point, can I flip off my global warming switch now? And go back to believing that mankind has very little to do with the temperature of the globe?
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