What People Cannot Do. Implicit in the conviction of the general public that human activity must be responsible for "global warming" is the assumption that people are so powerful that they can control everything — even tho we know full well that we have no such power. Still, if the planet is getting warmer, we must be responsible, right?
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Forget about all those Ice Ages and warmer periods between, going back into the most remote parts of our planetary past, all of which happened when there weren't any people on the planet at all, or when people could not have had any impact of consequence whatsoever, for not being very numerous nor widespread, nor sending millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Some other mechanism might have worked then, but not now? Hm.
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Let's talk about what people cannot do, and then ask if we are really so powerful that we can alter the climate of a planet that is 8,000 miles in diameter, on which we are not so thick as the slimmest film of mold on an orange.
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Let's start with climate, and its day-to-day version, weather. We can't end droughts by making rain, even when there are clouds in the sky. We can't make clouds appear over deserts, and even if we could, we couldn't get them to send down rain.
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We can't prevent tornadoes, nor stop them once they start.
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We can't prevent hurricanes, cyclones, or typhoons, nor even tropical depressions, nor stop them once they start.
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We can't stop snowstorms or thunderstorms, rainstorms nor even the gentlest of drizzles.
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We can't end heat waves or windstorms. We can't make wind where there is none.
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In short, we can't affect anything in weather whatsoever. Weather is the little brother, the moment-in-time of climate. If we can't change weather in the tiniest degree, why would we even think we could change climate?
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What else can't science and technology, and all the industries and daily activities of all human beings put together do?
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We can't make fleas, mosquitos, tsetse flies, cockroaches, nor any other insect pest go extinct. Every year, insects kill tens of millions of people and animals directly, by draining them of so much blood that tiny kittens die from anemia, or indirectly, thru the diseases they carry, which have no other way of moving from one animal host to another than thru an insect "vector".
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We can't eradicate the boll weevil, Japanese beetle, corn borer, aphid, spider mite, apple worm, or any of dozens of other agricultural and garden insect pests.
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We can't eliminate the liver fluke, heartworm, tapeworm, flatworm, roundworm, mange, rabies, or any of dozens of other ravagers of pets and wildlife.
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We can't render extinct the microorganisms that kill elm trees and wither, or create destructive or merely unsightly scaly patches on citrus and other crops.
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We can't cure a host of individual diseases nor that built-in cell wilding we call "cancer". Reports of new medical marvels are hugely exaggerated when it comes to cancer, as we keep discovering when this rich celebrity gets ovarian cancer and vows to beat it, or that fabulously wealthy celebrity develops pancreatic cancer and swears he'll triumph — then dies despite the best medical treatment millions of dollars can buy.
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We can't alter the genetic makeup of anything as to build in sterility as to eradicate the species, be it a microbe, an insect, or a larger pest (such as wild rats).
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We can't make life from scratch, and the instant anything dies — really dies — we can't bring it back to life, even one tenth of a second later.
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We can't deliberately trigger small seismic events to foreclose catastrophic earthquakes. We can't even predict earthquakes reliably.
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Speaking of things we can't do reliably, we can't even detect lies 100% or the time — hell, 80% of the time — as to give us reliable verdicts in criminal or even civil trials.
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To this short list of things in nature that we can't do, I'm sure other people can add entire categories of things I haven't mentioned, plus more examples of the types of thing I have mentioned.
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Let's get back to climate change. In saying the Earth was 8,000 miles across, I rounded up a tiny bit. The actual diameter is 'only' 7,926.41 miles around the equator or 7,901 miles pole to pole. Let's put that in context. The Empire State Building (my favorite building in all the world) is 1,472 feet tall, including the broadcast antenna. The Earth is, on average, 7,913 miles in diameter. That is 41,780,640 feet. Dividing by 1,472 yields a 'height' for the Earth of 28,383 Empire State Buildings. And the Empire State Building is a lot taller than people are.
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Let us assume, generously, that the average height of human beings is 6 feet. In actuality, most people are closer to 5 feet tall, even most women in the First World. In many parts of the great world, such as the high Andes, a typical adult male is at best 5 feet tall, and an adult female might be closer to 4 feet tall. There are few human populations in which the average stature is greater than 6  feet. Let's just use 6 feet as a measure for average male height (and understand that that is a slite overstatement).
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The Earth is 41,780,640 feet in diameter. Divide that by 6 and you find that the Earth is 6,963,440 times as deep as people are tall. Ah, but, you might reply, what matters is not the depth of the Earth entire but only of its atmosphere, which is where global warming takes place.
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OK. Let's measure the atmosphere.

The troposphere is the layer closest to the Earth, approximately 11km high. Weather occurs only in the troposphere because it is this layer that contains most of the water vapour. Weather is the way water changes in the air, and so without water there would be no clouds, rain, snow or other weather features. [There would, of course, still be winds.]

11 kilometers is 36,089 feet. Divide that by 6 and you see that people are 1/6,015th the height of the troposphere.
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We are, in short, utterly and absolutely insignificant as compared to the atmosphere.
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Moreover, 71% of the planet is covered by oceans, where not a single human being resides, much less large populations living a First World existence of profligate energy usage fueled by consumption of fossil fuels and resultant output of large quantities of greenhouse gases.
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Other large portions of this planet's surface are occupied by deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and other natural features in which human beings are either totally or largely absent. The habitable portion of the Earth is in fact only about 12.5%! Moreover, much of the Third World is living in a pre-industrial condition, contributing little to the planetary output of greenhouse gases. So we'd have to reduce, for greenhouse-gas purposes, at least another 2% of the planet's surface.
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So an infinitesimally small coating of human population upon less than 1/10th of the planet's surface is changing the entire planet's climate?!? What kind of power would that take?
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Consider the relative energy of nature as against man.

A hurricane generates the same energy every second as a small hydrogen bomb[.]

A website called "Plausible Futures", in considering what we might be able to do in the way of altering weather as a weapon, says:

The quantities of energy involved in weather systems exceed by a substantial margin the quantity of energy under man’s direct control. * * *

For instance, the typical amount of energy expended in a single tornado funnel is equivalent to about fifty kilotons of explosives; a single thunderstorm tower exchanges about ten times this much energy during its lifetime; an Atlantic hurricane of moderate size may draw from the sea more than 1,000 megatons of energy.

To put that in context,

By chaining together numerous stages with increasing amounts of fusion fuel, thermonuclear weapons can be made to an almost arbitrary yield; the largest ever detonated (the Tsar Bomba of the USSR) released an energy equivalent to over 50 million tons (megatons) of TNT, though most modern weapons are nowhere near that large.

The Plausible Futures webpage points out something else we cannot do: suppress lightning. It also discusses willful climate modification, more than weather modification.

In considering whether or not climate modification is possible, it is useful to examine climate variations under natural conditions. Firm geological evidence exists of a long sequence of Ice Ages, in the relatively recent past, which shows that the world’s climate has been in a state of slow evolution. There is also good geological, archaeological and historical evidence for a pattern of smaller, more rapid fluctuations superimposed on the slow evolutionary change. For example, in Europe the climate of the early period following the last Ice Age was continental, with hot summers and cold winters. In the sixth millennium B.C. [5,000 to 6,000 B.C.; prehistory], there was a change to a warm humid climate with a mean temperature of 5ºF higher than at present and a heavy rainfall that caused considerable growth of peat. This period, known as a climatic optimum, was accentuated in Scandinavia by a land subsidence which permitted a greater influx of warm Atlantic water into the large Baltic Sea.

The climatic optimum was peculiar. While on the whole there was a very gradual decrease of rainfall, the decrease was interrupted by long droughts during which the surface peat dried. This fluctuation occurred several times, the main dry periods being from 2000 to 1900, 1200 to 1000 and 700 to 500 B.C. The last, a dry heat wave lasting approximately 200 years, was the best developed. The drought, though not sufficiently intense to interrupt the steady development of forests, did cause extensive migrations of peoples from drier to wetter regions.

A change to colder and wetter conditions occurred in Europe about 500 B.C. and was by far the greatest and most abrupt alteration in climate since the end of the last Ice Age. It had a catastrophic effect on the early civilization of Europe: large areas of forest were killed by the rapid growth of peat and the levels of the Alpine lakes rose suddenly, flooding many of the lake settlements. This climatic change did not last long [in geological terms: only 500 years!]; by the beginning of the Christian era, conditions did not differ greatly from current ones. Since then climatic variations have continued to occur and although none has been as dramatic as that of 500 B.C. a perturbation known as the little ice age of the seventeenth century is a recent noteworthy example. The cause of these historical changes in climate remains shrouded in mystery[.]

Four things are worthy of note here. First, a temperature of 5ºF warmer than today is regarded as a "climatic optimum": ideal. So if global warming is occurring, hooray! We're heading toward the optimum.
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Second, very substantial changes in climate have occurred in relatively recent times (the past 2,500 years) without any human input whatsoever.
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Third, we don't know, even with the benefit of hindsight and historical distance, what caused these earlier changes. Thus it is very likely that we don't know the cause(s) of any present trend, and to say we do is arrogant (not to say "nonsense").
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And fourth, altering climate would require knowledge of things we don't yet understand and expenditure of huge quantities of energy we don't control.
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That site does speculate about one far-fetched means to cool much of the planet and freeze temperate-zone, oceanfront countries, but not to heat the planet. The only countries that could profit from such a plan are in the interior of equatorial regions, and all such countries are backward and poor, utterly incapable of taking the actions such a plan would require.
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In short, we could not produce climate change if we tried to, at least not in the short term. Why would we think we could do so long-term, without even intending to?
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Is it all arrogance? Silliness? Or is there an element of Christian guilt-gathering? Good people never think themselves good enuf. The advanced world is almost wholly Christian, and it is in Christian countries that frantic worry about "global warming" is worst. Surely we can't enjoy so many good things, when so much of the world is starving and otherwise suffering, without having to pay a moral price, can we? Surely we can't have so many material goods without doing harm, can we? Surely we are living on borrowed time or off someone else's labors. Surely divine justice will get us in the end, and global warming is the way. No, surely not.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,667 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:20 PM