When people panic they do stupid things

Back in the 70's I remember looking across the Hudson River and seeing a brownish-gray dome of smog over New York City. I also remember going to the Raritan River in Central Jersey to get a water sample for science class and seeing foam on the river from the phosphates. Realistic environmental laws addressing real problems have cleaned up air and water pollution that presented real health and ecological problems. We still have a long way to go, Los Angeles and Houston regularly trade the title for most polluted city, they each take great pride when the other city takes the lead as the dirtiest. And yes there have been some (many?) screwball laws put in place to protect spotted owls where they are thriving or to maintain wetlands that don't have any water on them all at the expense of people trying to earn a living.

All our environmental laws, even the ones that seem a bit over restrictive, use scientific data to explain real situations that are taking place now, in real time. Until now.

The fears regarding global warming have some people so worried that they are willing to consider outright stupid actions to combat something that the data shows is primarily natural variation and is long term. All of the dire predictions for global warming with any credibility discuss the conditions of the world after 50 or 100 years. In 2050 or in 2100 the Earth will be __________ because of man-made global warming and we have to do XYZ now to stop it. (I am not even considering the scenarios presented by people like Al Gore who say that a major catastrophe will happen the day after tomorrow). We can have several other posts analyzing our ability to predict the climate 50 or 100 years in the future when we cannot predict the weather 5 days in advance with any great deal of accuracy.

The article linked to this post regards a "solution" that is being discussed more and more - Pollute the air to prevent global warming and cool the planet. This is nuts!

The fact that a Nobel Laureate proposed the idea does not make it any more credible or reasonable. Only a fraction of the temperature rise can be attributed to human activity by the UN's own data. Proposal's such as these will make our environment far worse without doing anything to resolve the target issue. Increasing particluates in the air to block sunlight in an effort to reduce the level of warming in the atmosphere is guaranted to:

• cause an increase in asthma cases in children and the elderly
• generate a higher volume of acid rain
• The more acid rain causes increased damage to grasses and leaves, dunuding many trees, killing them and reducing the amount of CO2 naturally conumed through photosynthesis.
• Sulphates in the air can attack ozone destroying the ozone layer of the atmosphere
• Reduce ozone in the atmosphere will allow more UV radiation to pass to the ground causing an increase in skin cancer and eye damage

I am certain that if we tried we can continue this list much further. Intentionally polluting the atmosphere after we have done so much to clean it up from past mistakes is stupid and would create a true climate disaster.

Trackbacked to: Dumb Ox News, Woman Honor Thyself, AB Freedom, 123 Beta, Merge Right