CLIMATE change is real, and has constantly been changing ever since, but contrary to the massive propaganda it is allegedly anthropogenic or caused by man-made global warming, true science says human activities, like industrialization and transport emissions, do not cause global warming.
- Is it man-made or Mann-made? The biggest argument used by the United Nations’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and carried by Al Gore’s Climate Change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is the “Hockey Stick” theory by climatologist Michael Mann.
Mann’s study of global temperature the past 1,000 years or so recorded the spike in temperature starting in the 19th century with a graph like the shape of a hockey stick, which many politically motivated environmentalists associate directly to man-made industrialization and the massive influx of motor vehicles. This was done by getting deep earth samples from the polar region, where he made correlations between carbon dioxide (CO2) content and residues capturing temperature levels, although correlation does not establish causality.
This was debunked by many scientists and there are voluminous literature on this over the Internet. Some 31,000 scientists even signed a petition opposing this. Many scientists resigned from IPCC, which is composed more of people from government and non-governmental organizations.
- Facts don’t follow theory. In the Global Warming Swindle documentary, earth’s history shows climate changed, contrary to the unscientific propaganda that an increase in CO2 leads to global warming, followed by climate change. Prof. Philip Stott of University of London noted that when humans were not yet producing CO2, we had little ice ages and warm periods. In the 14th century, Europe was in a Little Ice Age, as shown by illustrations of ice fairs and people skating on the Thames River. In the medieval period, England had a warm climate, as manifested in the writings of English poet Chaucer and the memories to this day of historic sites in England like vineyards, Vine Hill, Vine Street, Vinery, etc.
At the turn of the 19th century, temperatures rose by almost half- percent Celsius, but during the post- World War II economic boom up to 1975, they dropped even when CO2 rose to their peaks with industrialization, thus negating the global- warming scare theory.
- More proof from Moore. Green Peace’s cofounder, scientist Patrick Moore, left Green Peace when it abandoned science and turned too political, starting with its Global Chlorine Ban, when chlorine is the only technology that can purify water on a mass scale. Chlorine evaporates in 30 minutes, making water already safe. Moreover, 75 percent of medicines are chlorine-based.
Carbon dioxide may have increased from 260 parts per million (ppm) to 400 ppm the past two centuries, this is still a negligible 0.0004 of 100 percent or a million parts. Over the last 600 million years, average CO2 levels were even at 2,000 ppm, which is ideal for plant growth, Moore said. One can only get dizzy at 30,000 ppm of CO2.
We even need more CO2 to develop agriculture and more greenery. Carbon dioxide is also used as a refrigerant, There is even a web site, I Love CO2.com, but why is CO2 restricted, if the bigger greenhouse gas is water vapor, which is 850-percent stronger than CO2, and 2.1 percent more in volume than CO2. In fact, without water vapor, the Earth will be 14-percent colder.
Apparently, there are interest groups that do not want less-developed countries to industrialize. So their strategy is to put a cap on CO2, which means to go slow on
industrialization.
Moore, a Canadian, could not also understand why Green Peace is against hydropower dams, which is the cheapest renewable energy and account for 60 percent of Canada’s power. It also opposed China’s Three Gorges Hydro Dams, which produce 22,500 megawatts, equivalent to 40 coal plants, and even got the World Bank to pull out funding support.
Green Peace and groups like the Worldwild Life Fund also push for costly age-old renewable energy (RE). Windmills made of steel may be more efficient, but are no different than Holland’s 12th- century wooden mills, as there is no energy when there is no wind. Solar is another costly RE with very low energy flux density, but may still be appropriate in remote areas.
- We need smart-agri vs. climate change. Regardless of the arguments, climate change is here to stay and we need to prepare agriculture as the first line of defense. This was stressed at a Philippine Agricultural Journalists (PAJ) forum sponsored by the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program based at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Among the speakers were Dr. Julian Gonsalvez of the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction; Dr. Reiner Wassmann of IRRI, Victor Cruz of the UP Los Baños College of Forestry; and Dr. Rex Navarro, a PAJ director and member of the Climate Change CCAFS team.
Navarro summed up the measures to be climate-resilient as follows: 1)Farmers need to be knowledge-smart; 2) Seed-smart by using quality-resilient hybrid seeds; 3) Water-smart or irrigation that can manage drought or floods; 4) Nutrient-smart, balancing organic and inorganic fertilization; 5) Energy-smart by adopting appropriate and efficient technologies not dependent on fossil fuel; and 6) Market-smart.
On water resources, Gonsalvez says unlike African countries, which lack rain, we are blessed with rainfall that we can harness to make it possible to have three crops a year. He adds that in Capiz, 40 reservoirs were built, allowing farmers to grow three crops. It only took a backhoe two days to build one reservoir, so why can’t we do this nationwide on a mass scale? On competitiveness, as we could not match Vietnam’s and Thailand’s production costs of P6 per kilo with our P11 to P12 per kilo, Cruz said we should plant crops other than rice, corn and coconut. He stressed the need to also correct so many institutional and policy weaknesses.
Wassmann added it is not only “a question of productivity. It is also a question of adaptation, that diversity is always good”.
In summary, climate change is a fact, but is not caused by humans, thus we need to bring back science and technology to explore all the other maybe seven to 10 natural causes, which are a whole discourse altogether. We also need to change the climate of governance to be more relevant to the imminent threats of climate change.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com.
2 comments
Michael Makabenta Alunan is an idiot. I’m getting down to his level.
You sure are ….