Oh Pewk! Bloody Al Gore Again?

This Bear is really starting to get worried about Global Warming. No, I'm not worried about carbon emissions, or heat sinks, or greenhouses. I'm worried about "Global Warming - The Issue".

This, people, is something spinning out of control, whipped up by ignorant journalists and opportunistic politicians, and backed by pseudo science of the very worst kind.

I've been saying for a while now that, even though we've treated our environment and resources with reckless disregard, and there is the strongest of arguments for changing our ways, this "Humans Did It" Global Warming thing is at best, total bullshit, and at worst, an attempt to manipulate and control us for some as yet unknown political end.

Today I discover that the ultra hypocrite and champion of inconvenient truths, Al Gore, has organised "Live Earth", 7 simultaneous rock concerts around the world to "raise the awareness of global warming". It's called 7/7/7 (that's the date), and a bunch of so-called celebrities get yet anotehr stage from which they can lecture us on something else they know little to nothing about. Maybe, if they really wanted to save energy and cut down on carbon emissions, they'd turn down the power on those amplifiers.

Sharp perspective time people...

FACT: The world's climate is NOT stable, has never been stable, and never will be stable. It gets hotter, it gets colder, it gets hotter again. Ice sheets form. Ice sheets melt. Ice sheets form again. Coral reefs grow. Coral reefs die. Oceans rise. Oceans fall. Boo bloody hoo... it's just part of a natural cycle.

FACT: Climate change has happened before, and it will happen long after humans are extinct fossil remains in the bedrock.

FACT: A miniscule immeasurable increase in solar radiation... that is... the heat from the sun... is going to do more to heat up the world than we ever could.

FACT: All of the other planets in the solar system are currently experiencing global warming. Um... wow... I didn't know we had the technology to get to any of them, let alone cause global warming on them. Maybe Star Trek really is a documentary.

FACT: The other major contributor to global warming is an accelleration of tectonic plate movement. A what? You know... I've talked about this before... the plates move apart at the bottoms of the oceans, spewing the molten innards of the earth out into the sea. Plates that, 20 years ago, were moving apart at a rate of 5cm a year are now moving at 15cm a year. Why? It's probably because in 1974, the earth's rotation got the wobbles. For 30 years before '74, the world was cooling down... so much so that scientists were warning of a coming catastrophic ice age. Since '74, we've been heating up again mostly thanks to a change in our aspect to the sun. Damn. That wasn't in Al's film... how did he miss that?

FACT: The total increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last hundred years is measured in double digit parts per million... that is, an almost undetectable 50 or 60 parts per million. And, of course, there's still argument about this, because the measured increase might be partly, or even entirely due to an improvement in measuring technology.

FACT: And here's the bit Al Gore et al inconveniently ignore most... human CO2 output is a TINY fraction of the total CO2 output around the world. The vast majority of CO2 entering the atmosphere does so by "natural geological release", that is, it seeps out of rocks, or is released by seismic or volcanic activity. Humans and their CO2 emissions could vanish from this world, and the planet wouldn't notice.

Do you really want to know how much carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere? Ok... stick with me through some very scratchy arithmetic here... The total amount of carbon dioxide output by humans is around twenty five billion tonnes a year. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? 25 with more zeros than Pearl Harbour. It's a bigger number than most of us can comprehend, but how much is that, really?

This might put it in perspective for you... a cubic metre of the stuff at 25degC at sea level weighs about one and a half kilos. Through the magic of some really shonky rough cut maths, I will tell you that if you scooped it all up and put it in one place, it would make make a cube of gas around 2.5km on all sides.

You think that sounds REALLY big, don't you? Actually, as a proportion of the total of the world, it's so tiny you'd have trouble seeing it from space without a good spy satellite. It would be a dot that wouldn't stretch from the The Sydney Harbour Bridge to Darling Harbour, or from Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty, or from St Pauls Cathedral to the Houses of Parliament. It isn't even three quarters of the length of the runway at LAX. To understand how staggeringly small this is, go to google earth, zoom in on any one of the landmarks I've just mentioned, and then zoom out again. You have to zoom out a long way before you can see the whole world.

Real scientists are speaking up though. Professor Ian Plimer is Dean of Geology at Adelaide University. He gave a lecture yesterday that wasn't widely reported, in which he described the total contribution of humans to global warming as "miniscule" and "insiginificant". Geologists have a much better handle on this whole thing than climatologists could ever have. That's because geologists have seen it all before, and Plimer added his considerable voice to the chorus of real, but largely ignored scientists who are challenging the merchants of panic by trying to bring some sense and science into the debate.

Just to finish off, here's some more useless information for you...
If you could gather all of the fossil fuels consumed in the world and dump them in one place, they would bury greater Los Angeles to a depth of about 70cm, or, in the old money, 27 inches. That sludge is barely over knee height for an average out-of-work actor, and there are many who might think that there is no more fitting a dump for this stuff than LA.

Ok... so we've got 27". Now I want you to put that in perspective... burn it. Go on. Imagine a huge fire covering all of Los Angeles (which, as you'll have seen from google earth, really is just a tiny dot on the globe). That's a 12,000sq km fire that has to burn through 70cm of fuel. And it has a whole year to do it. The 2003 Victorian bushfire consumed more than 56,000 sq km, four times the area of Los Angeles, and it did it in two months, consuming a fuel density far greater than 70cm.

Oh... and I nearly forgot to mention... wildfires in the USA burn an area slightly less than the size of Los Angeles every year, pumping... yes, you guessed it, nearly the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as all of the activities of human fossil fuel burning world wide. That's just fires in the USA. Bushfires in Australia consume around 5 times that each year, generating 5 times the amount of CO2 as the burning of fossil fuels. And I haven't even mentioned fires in Canada, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, and everywhere else.

Finally, here's Al Gore's most inconvenient truth (and thanks to CAW for this)...
That 20 room mansion of his consumes 20 times more energy than the average American home. It's only 5 times larger than the average American home, but it's so poorly designed that it's an energy guzzler. "Do as I say", says Al, "not as I do."

Are you getting the picture yet?