Snow in the Sahara

Can We Stop Global Warming?

On this day in 1979 snow fell in the Sahara desert. I wonder if people talked about global cooling?

Global warming cannot be stopped. Let me follow us this up by saying I support any effort to improve our environment and cut down on greenhouse emissions. My wife and I share one car, a Honda Civic, between the two of us to cut down on our own fuel usage. I believe the United States should never have backed out of Kyoto, but Kyoto won't help.

I believe the scientific data. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, 11 of the 12 hottest days on record have occurred since 1995.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that by 2100, temperatures will have risen between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees. OK, so what now?

Kyoto policies can be enacted but the global community as a whole is not cutting down on use of fossil fuels. One needs only look at population growth in countries like India and auto sales trends in China to see that the consumptions of crude fuel will only escalate in the coming years.

Why the lack of true effort on a widespread scale to change to readily available alternative fuel sources? Programs like Kyoto make us complacent. We are handed programs that are the result of government lip service to make it appear as though they are addressing the problem, and we accept these token limits, caps and restrictions.

The reality is that these gases have built up over centuries and even the stoppage of all fossil fuel use now will not stop warming as a result of that build-up. It is time for the discussion to change from how do we stop global warming to how can it be lived with.

It is difficult for that discussion to even begin, however, as the scientific community is still at odds about just what is happening.

Recent reports have highlighted man made causes, but reports exist that say otherwise. Of course there are those that say global warming is not happening, some studies indicate that while the northern polar cap is shrinking, the southern cap may actually be growing, those that say the earth is cooling; there are even some who say it is caused by solar cycles and point to a September 20th, 2006 release from NASA which states, "for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress." This is the equivalent of 6 years on Earth.

The shrinking is substantial. According to Michael Malin, principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera, the polar ice cap is shrinking at "a prodigious rate." Certainly this is isn't caused by man.

Duke research scientists have concluded that the sun may have minimally contributed about 10 to 30 percent of global surface warming.

Regardless of what theory you accept the only solution is a massive overhaul of our global culture and society that currently rest on a foundation of crude oil. Oh boy . . .