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At first glance, the stimulus bill to resolve the current economic mess by pouring tons of borrowed money into a credit and investment abyss seems to violate the adage: “If you’re in a hole, quit digging.” Since that money is borrowed from the future, future revenues will be needed for payback purposes. One method being pursued is a carbon tax assessed on the generation of carbon dioxide.
Carbon taxes are already being collected in some areas. Residents of Boulder, Colo., pay a municipal carbon tax based on their kilowatt hours used. Such a tax is part of the stimulus plan, and the beauty of a carbon tax is that it can be added almost anywhere in the energy chain … on coal and oil producers, at the pump, on utility bills, or all of the above. One thing is certain: In the mind of government, there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a tax.
The moral justification for the carbon tax is the belief that human-generated carbon dioxide is the driving force of global warming. Maintaining that belief requires ignoring certain inconvenient facts. One conflicting fact is contained in the findings of Antarctic ice core samples. The Russian Vostok samples go back over 400,000 years, while the European EPICA drilling exceeded 700,000 years of climate history. In both, cycles of glaciation alternate with periods of warming in 100,000-year swings, with us at the most recent warming spike.
Smaller warming cycles are indicated in the March/April
2009 issue of the magazine Archaeology in its article “Climate Change: Sites in Peril.” Though the piece was written from the perspective of ancient human sites being damaged by the recent warming trend, it also indicates earlier warming periods.
One section of the article regards the melting of Greenland’s ice belt along its eastern and northern coast, which in recent years was 30 to 40 miles wide. The concern was over sites of the Thule culture, which migrated to the area 2,000 years ago, with the lack of the ice belt leaving them exposed to ocean waves. However, since the villages were originally built on the coast to facilitate whaling, that means the climate was warmer and the coast ice free when the settlements were established. Also pertinent is the fact that Greenland was again marginally warm enough 1,000 years later for Viking settlers to raise livestock and a few hardy crops.
Another section of the Archaeology article described the current retreat of the Schnidejoch glacier in the Swiss Alps, exposing artifacts of ancient people crossing through a pass in the vicinity. An interesting fact is the existence of 1,000-year gaps in the depositing of those artifacts when colder periods blocked the pass with ice. So the 100,000 warming and cooling cycles indicated by the Antarctic ice core samples appear to be broken into 1,000-year mini-cycles.
That leads to the question: If, as Al Gore and others in his flock believe, human activity is at fault for the recent warming period, then what human activity could have caused other climate variations dating back hundreds of thousands of years?
As a carbon-based life form exhaling carbon dioxide on a very regular basis, I prefer thinking carbon isn’t an evil substance threatening the existence of life on Earth. And objective evidence indicates that even if it is, there are larger forces than humanity changing its levels. Besides, the vast majority of CO2 atmospheric releases result from ocean cycles, volcanism and vegetation decomposition. So what point is there in political leaders attempting to control our carbon output if the only real result from their efforts will be higher taxes, bigger government, and greater government control of human activity?
I might have just answered my own question.
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Of course there has been warmer and cooler periods over the last 4 billion years. 10,000 years ago the earths population was about 1 million, today it is 7,000 millions. Is it possible (?) that this could cause any changes in our environment ? Is it possible that we could have some impact on climate ?