Montrose - Daily Press

Climate change and the human factor

Re: Global warming debate

My World Book Encyclopedia copyrighted 1969 includes these words under the heading Changes in Climate: “For the past 10,000 years, the general trend has been toward warmer and rainier climates in middle latitudes. There have been relatively short periods of 50 to 100 years when the climate became colder. From about 1850 to 1950, there was a small trend toward slightly higher temperatures... Average temperatures became slightly colder in the mid-1900s. No one knows if this trend will continue.”

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Now we know that the trend toward colder temperatures has not continued, so far. But we do understand the longer term trend is toward more change of one direction or the other.

With all due respect to Ms. Liz Rankin, her letter attempting to respond to Mr. Hans Crober failed to do that but instead served to illustrate Mr. Tim Jacobs’ point perfectly, that emotions rather than logic and science governs much of the climate change debate.

To shed more light on the subject without the usual heat, I recommend to your readers the excellent book, “Unstoppable Global Warming, every 1,500 Years” by Professor S. Fred Singer and Dennis T Avery. Prof. Singer is a climate physicist, internationally known for his work on climate, energy, and environmental issues. He was the first director of the U. S. National Weather Satellite Service, and served more than five years as vice chairman of the U. S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmospheres.

He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and 400 technical papers. He did his undergraduate work at Ohio State University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Dennis T. Avery was a senior analyst in the U. S. State Department where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983 and also holds outstanding performance awards from the Department of Agriculture and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

In the conclusion of this book, the authors say that “the warming phase of the 1500-year climate cycle will bring some moderate changes in global temperatures. Summer temperatures will rise, on average, only slightly. However, there will be uncomforatable heat waves, as there are now.”

The book also concludes that the scary effects of warming such as more hurricanes are nonsense. Of course, glaciers will continue to melt as they have for the past 10,000 years, more or less. Human activities may have contributed slightly to the global warming, more likely from the well-documented “heat island” effect of cutting forests to build cities, parking lots and highways than from CO2 greenhouse gas. The principle cause of warming and cooling cycles is the sun, as Mr. Crober pointed out.

Millions of Americans have already volunteered for such “global warming”by relocating to the South and Southwest. Their climate change is at least as great as most of the world’s inhabitants should expect in the next several centuries and they love it. As a skier and and environmentalist, I would prefer a cooler climate as well as more reliance on non-polluting energy, where it is economically sound. Today, the world’s electrical energy consumption is nearly 12 billion kilowatt hours of which 85 percent is fossil fueled. In the next 50 years, a doubling of this amount is projected.

The only non-CO2 emitting source that can meet that need is nuclear energy. It is too bad that those who fear global warming also fear the only viable solution.

George E. Cort

Montrose

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