Feedback: Is Global Cooling What We Should Worry About?

Feb. 12, 2015
A reader tells us "we should be more concerned about coming to the end of this 10,000 year warm period."

I don't send many emails to the editor, but felt I needed to in this case.

I was quite interested in your discussion of the Keystone pipeline in the December issue of your magazine ("The Beautiful Engineering of the Keystone Pipeline"), and minus the third paragraph, your report was excellent. However, I had to read through [a paragraph acknowledging global warming] to get to the fourth.

I am not advocating any specific answer to the statement, but do encourage our writers to look at actual facts and not fall into the mindless rut of some our political (not technical) scientists. Even Al Gore bought a house right on the beach a couple of feet above the ocean at the same time he was telling everyone that the current beach would be below water. The condition of neither the beach nor the house have changed.

Anecdotally, all that supposed warming has resulted in some pretty cold winters in the eastern U.S. lately. Doesn't it seem funny that warming produces cold? Now moving on to the technical side, I recommend you look up specific heats for various gasses to discover the actual gas that holds the most heat. It is not CO2. Next let's look back at some old Earth history. There were ice sheets across the northern U.S. as recently as 10,000 years ago; thus, there must have been some warming going on since that time. A review of the history of the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere shows that the last 10,000 years has been warmer than the previous 100,000 years, and there seems to be an ongoing pattern having that same frequency. If this history is correct, we should likely be more concerned about coming to the end of this 10,000 year warm period and thus we are heading toward cooling instead of heating. You might remember that global cooling was the rage from the doomsayers about 30 years ago.

And one last issue is a question. Does anyone ever wonder how all that oil formed as a result of plant decay in the frozen north, especially below tundra when it is so cold? The answer might be that the tectonic plates travel around the Earth like wayfaring vagabonds, but it might be instead that those deposits were formed under warmer conditions. Frankly, we don't have conditions that exist today that would allow any widespread formation of the thick coal seams that were produced 64 to 80 million years ago. I think that the view through eyes that are less than 100 years old (compared to 4.5 billion years, the age of the planet) leaves us the ability to imagine all sorts of things that are not correct.

By the way, the rest of the magazine is also quite interesting and informative.