Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Breathing causes global warming

That's right. The very process that gives your body energy converts carbon found in your food and oxygen in your bloodstream into carbon dioxide. Every time you breath you are removing a little oxygen from the air and releasing carbon dioxide into the air.

In fact, there is no way to prevent a human being from releasing carbon dioxide into the air through the processes of life or even death. If you are breathing, you are emitting carbon dioxide. If you're not breathing, you're likely dead. If you're dead, you are either going to be burned in a furnace (cremated) or you're going to slowly rot away. Either of those two processes will release carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. In fact it's the main greenhouse gas that the global warming alarmists want us to worry about. And yet, it's a byproduct of all animal life.

Nature has a wonderful system for removing the carbon dioxide that animals produce from the air. It's called photosynthesis.

This is the process by which plants convert carbon dioxide, water vapor (another, much more powerful, but seldom mentioned in the mainstream media greenhouse gas), and solar energy, and convert them into glucose and oxygen. Photosynthesis is a wonder, and it's responsible for nearly all of the free oxygen in our atmosphere today.

Given that, you'd think that planting more trees would be the answer to the global warming problem. You'd be wrong though. There are other greenhouse gasses besides carbon dioxide and water vapor. There's methane. Guess what. Trees emit methane in the presence of air, and in large amounts. Researchers estimate that trees and other living vegetation produce between 20 and 30% of all of the methane emissions released globally every year!

Trees emit more than methane and oxygen. They also emit many of the chemicals that produce smog. The volatile organic compounds produced by trees are similar to the unburned hydrocarbons that come out of your car's exhaust pipe. Smog is produced when these chemicals mix with nitrogen oxides in the presence of sunlight and produce ozone.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the fast-growing trees that produce the most volatile organic compounds are planted more and more to satisfy our need for lumber. Apparently mankind is to blame for the smog produced by trees as well.

Interestingly enough ozone is considered a pollutant in the lower atmosphere, but let's not forget that there's an "ozone hole" in the upper atmosphere that's eventually going to let us all die of skin cancer.

If only we could find a way to move the ozone from the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere… maybe something like the mechanism that moves chloro-flouro-carbons into the upper atmosphere where they allegedly destroy ozone.

The chemical reactions in that process are well known. There is some evidence that things aren't as bad as we've been led to believe, and nitrogen oxides in the stratosphere are a part of that evidence.

In any case, the ozone depletion story is just a side issue.

It also matters where you plant trees. Planting them in mid-latitude regions would only have marginal benefits, and planting them in northern latitudes will actually result in increased warming due to the albedo effect. Imagine that, trees are darker than snow, so they will absorb more solar energy and re-radiate it into the atmosphere.

What happens when trees die? Well, if they die on their own and aren't "harvested" for lumber they sit and rot. The carbon that they've accumulated is slowly converted into carbon dioxide and methane and re-released into the atmosphere. Apparently trees are only a "short term" carbon sink.

I guess we can forget about carbon-sinks to offset our carbon emissions. Buying "carbon credits" doesn't really reduce our carbon emissions anyway, it's just a way to transfer our burden to someone else. Someone who'll in all likelihood plant trees in the wrong place. It's just another way to transfer our money to someone else in exchange for feeling a bit better about ourselves. I'll come back to that in a bit.

If the only carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere was the result of the processes mentioned so far, I don't imagine that anyone would be alarmed about global warming. However there are other anthropogenic sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide that are "significant", and that we can "do something about".

We obtain roughly 80% of the energy we use by burning fossil fuels. Over 50% of the electricity produced and used in the United States is produced by coal burning power plants. Our cars, trucks, airplanes and ships generally burn petroleum in one form or another.

Coal is nearly 100% carbon. Petroleum is made up of various hydrocarbons. Burning either one of them is guaranteed to produce carbon dioxide. Burning petroleum will also product water vapor, mentioned above as the most powerful of greenhouse gasses.

The coal industry claims to have found a way to produce energy from coal that doesn't produce so many greenhouse gasses. I don't believe it. After all, as I mentioned just a paragraph ago, coal is nearly 100% carbon. The only thing that will result from burning that carbon is carbon dioxide. So 100% of the emissions from burning coal are greenhouse gasses. There's no way to cut that number.

Despite what you may have heard, nuclear energy isn't likely to replace fossil fuels as a source of energy for a long time, if ever. The wastes produced by nuclear fission are highly radioactive and difficult to dispose of. I'm sure that most people would agree that nuclear wastes are far more dangerous to the environment than global warming.

Hydro-electric power is under attack by environmentalists as well. Apparently damming rivers to take advantage of the gravitational potential energy in all of that stored water is bad for fish.

How about extracting energy from the wind? That works in some areas, but really have you seen the wind farms? They require huge amounts of clear land in areas that generally have reliable winds. Environmentalists object to the clearing of that land, and the destruction of the ecosystems that exist where people want to put wind farms. Politicians don't want their view obstructed, so they don't want wind farms where they live. Those turning fan blades also endanger birds.

Bio-fuels are given as an alternative to fossil fuels. Ethanol is one of them. Producing them has its own drawbacks. Just as wind farms require large amounts of land, so do bio-fuels.

Just as burning hydrocarbons produces carbon dioxide, water vapor, and leaves unburned hydrocarbons in the air to produce smog, so does burning ethanol. Making ethanol from sugars also produces carbon dioxide.

Fertilizing the soil so that the crops used to produce ethanol will grow requires chemical fertilizers. The soil runoff from the farmlands pollutes the rivers and streams, resulting in fish kills.

Solar energy is yet another alternative to fossil fuels. Many people have solar water heaters on their roofs. The heated water is used for everything from bathing to heating their homes. Other ways to use solar energy exist though.

One of the most familiar is probably the "solar panels" that are used on so many spacecraft. Some homes and businesses have these solar panels on their roofs. There are environmental problems with these as well. Once again, the area required for solar panels is quite large. Small panels simply won't receive enough energy to be practical.

The other problem with solar panels is that the processes used to make them require toxic chemicals. The same chemicals that are used to make computer chips are used to make solar panels. Disposing of that chemical waste is a problem, but at least it's one that the chip makers have been forced to deal with for a long time.

Much has been made recently of the potential of cars that burn hydrogen, whether they use pure hydrogen in the combustion process or use fuel cells. Hydrogen is after all, the most abundant chemical element in the universe, and the only by-product of its combustion is water vapor.

The problem with that though is that free hydrogen is pretty scarce here on earth. Hydrogen is a very reactive element. We find it in hydrocarbons. We find it in water. We seldom find it in an uncombined form. To obtain the hydrogen needed for fuel we have to separate it chemically from whatever it's bound to, and that process requires energy.

In fact, because no energy conversion process is 100% efficient, producing hydrogen for the hydrogen economy will require more energy than the combustion of that hydrogen will provide. It's a sure bet that we won't be burning hydrogen to provide the energy to produce hydrogen.

All of these "alternative" energy sources have their drawbacks, just as the burning of fossil fuels does. One of the biggest drawbacks of bio-fuels and hydrogen is that it simply shifts the point where the environment is contaminated, either with carbon-dioxide or other pollutants, back away from the consumer. "Out of sight, out of mind", you know.

Consuming less energy is one way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. It's for this reason that many of our cities are mandating that we stop using incandescent light bulbs and start using more energy efficient "compact fluorescent" light bulbs. Never mind the fact that we don't produce them domestically.

The vast majority of compact fluorescent bulbs are produced in China. Producing them requires energy, and nearly all of the energy used by China to produce them comes from coal-fired electrical plants. To meet the increased demand for compact fluorescent light bulbs, China will have to boost their manufacturing capacity by a factor of ten. That's certain to require more coal-fired electrical plants, and China has overtaken the United States as the worlds leading emitter of greenhouse gasses.

By the way, there's another, serious drawback to the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs, or fluorescent light bulbs in general. Every fluorescent light in the world requires a vaporized drop of mercury to work. Mercury vapor is toxic, leading to brain damage. Environmentalists warn us about the dangers of mercury in the fish we eat, but they seem silent on the use of mercury to light our homes and businesses.

It's well known that other factors influence our climate, including variations in the intensity of radiation emitted by the sun as well as the influence of the sun's varying magnetic field upon the cosmic rays that reach the earth's atmosphere.

Massive cycles of warming and cooling have even been attributed to the solar system's orbit around the galaxy. As the sun moves along in its orbit its position relative to the galactic plane oscillates. As the sun moves above, below and through the galactic central plane, the intensity of cosmic radiation coming from the galactic center varies. Some scientists have correlated the periodic oscillation of the sun's position relative to the galactic plane with the ice age cycles.

We can't do anything about these non-anthropogenic factors. It's probably that they have a more significant effect on our climate than anthropogenic ones, especially when you note that there is evidence that our current warming cycle began before the industrial revolution.

Let's face it. Everything we do to make our lives more comfortable, or even possible has environmental consequences. While it's important that we clean up after ourselves, there is no escaping the fact that simply by living we are affecting the environment.

As for greenhouse gasses, nature produces far more of them than mankind. Volcanic eruptions emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Nevertheless, mankind's use of energy is responsible for a significant portion of what goes into the air.

Ultimately that use of energy is the target of the global warming alarmists. The global warming alarmists would have us fret over the carbon dioxide that we emit, even though nature emits more than mankind does.

The global warming alarmists would have us fret over the production of greenhouse gasses emitted by the cattle we raise for food, even though other animals that we do not eat also emit greenhouse gasses.

The thing is, the only way that mankind will reduce our carbon emissions is to reduce our energy consumption, or to find alternative energy sources. Those alternative energy sources also cause environmental damage, so they will ultimately fall under attack by "environmentalists".

We use the energy we consume for a wide variety of things. Without it, our society would be far less productive than it is, and many, many people would probably die of starvation or exposure to the elements.

Still a "crisis" like global warming (you do remember the global cooling crisis of the 1970's don't you) provides ample opportunity for government to get involved in finding a "solution". Vast amounts of government money have been made available for climate research.

This is seen by some as one of the reasons for the "consensus" among scientists that global warming is largely the result of human activity. When Michael Crichton published "State of Fear" and used this as one of his themes, people reviled him for it. People where I work actually loathed the book and some refused to read it because they thought of it as anti-environmental propaganda.

Research money provided by the government has to come from somewhere. I bet you can guess where. That's right, taxes. Global warming and the mitigation of global warming provide lots of opportunities for taxes. We can see this in proposed "carbon taxes" at local, state, federal, and even international levels.

All for little benefit. The United States rejected the Kyoto protocol because it didn't provide for carbon sinks, and because nations like China and developing nations were exempted. A far better reason would have been the fact that despite the massive costs of implementing the Kyoto protocol, the widely agreed upon temperature savings (amount of global warming avoided) for complete implementation of the Kyoto protocol by 2050 is only 0.07 degrees centigrade. That number is considerably smaller than the margin of error in calculating global temperature.

Global warming is a political issue more than a scientific issue. The biggest motivation for global warming alarmism is the opportunity for more government control over the world's economies. This is why the political left embraces it as a hot issue, and why climate change skeptics have been described as "deniers" worthy of Nuremberg style trials for crimes against humanity.

The futility of the proposed solutions to global warming is one reason why the political right rejects them. The fact that we may actually be better off in a warmer climate is another of the reasons why the political right rejects global warming as a hot issue. The notion of sovereignty destroying "global taxes" and the ultimate restrictions on human freedoms are even more reasons.

Climate change is just one of many environmental issues today where scientists and politicians are trying to alarm, or even frighten us. A rational look at it should give us all a clue that such alarmism is doing us all a disservice. What may have begun as sincere environmental concern has been co-opted into yet another mechanism for big government, and an opportunity for a socialist world order.

After all, breathing causes global warming.

Cross posted at NW Bloggers.

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Butch responded with:

Nice work. A convenient truth(s)...

David responded with:

"The wastes produced by nuclear fission are highly radioactive and difficult to dispose of." That's certainly the common mythconception. Numerous easy solutions abound (heck, worst case: encase them in glass and drop them into a subduction zone. No problem.) But what's the problem with radioactive wastes anyway? Most can be reused in various ways. And the fear of radioactive material is largely mythic. Maybe google "radiation" and "hormesis"--(google may yet save us from ourselves...) With any luck all the snake oil salesmen selling "radon detection kits" will be replaced by MDR for "Vitamin R (for ionizing radiation)". A guy can dream that someday already well-known, well-established facts concerning the safety of nuclear power would have at least some bearing on public policy.

Perri Nelson responded with:

David, Yes, there are some really good ways to get rid of nuclear wastes. None of them are particularly likely to get past politicians and environmentalists though. That's why I said "difficult to dispose of". Encasing them and burying them in Nevada turned out to be hugely unpopular. Out here in Washington we're still dealing with the wastes from Hanford. They were mishandled. The containers they were stored in leaked. The cleanup was mismanaged. It's become a fairly sensitive political issue out here. Nuclear power would be probably the best alternative power source we could use, except for the political problems it produces. Hollywood and the left haven't made it any easier to get support for it. Jane Fonda and the "China Syndrome" comes to mind. So does "The Simpsons". After all, how many of us want someone like Homer working in our nuclear power plants? Encasing the wastes in glass and dropping them into a subduction zone might just be the best solution of all. Someone would probably complain about the damage to the fragile coastal ecosystems or something like that though.

Sammy Benoit responded with: Global Warming

I was told that cow farts is really the cause of global warming..but if all it took was methane may wife wouldnt be cold all the time

vronzie mann responded with:

umm are you shure your not lying ??