Albert W.L. Moore Jr.


To the editor:

Global warming is good. This is a secret open to those with eyes who will see, which necessarily excludes the delirious dolts at the Nobel Foundation.

Global warming reduces human death and disease from hypothermia. It opens vast new regions to cultivation. It advances the tree line northward.  In the Siberian forests, the oxygen content of the air is 20 percent greater than it is above the tree line.

Global warming releases fresh water otherwise bound up in ice. We will be able to enjoy a Greenland that’s actually green, if we live 1,500 years, and if dust from volcanic eruptions and windstorms across Africa, and diminished solar activity do not cause the area to re-freeze by reducing solar energy transmitted to earth and deflecting such as would otherwise reach it.

James Owen, writing for National Geographic News, recently reported that “rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.”

His is a balanced account, however, which sets out reasonable hypotheses and takes note of enormous conflicting natural forces. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara_2.html.

Unlike Al Gore, Dr. James Hansen and their ilk, Owen does not make dogmatic predictions of impending disaster. Some of these can come back to haunt. Around 1988, Dr. Hansen predicted that in 20 years New York City’s west side highway would be under water. Nota bene: It isn’t, and it’s 20 years later. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen.

Nature and its vicissitudes rarely confer unmixed blessings. But it is likely that global warming will do more good and less harm than global cooling. With the recent historical lull in solar activity, we might need all the greenhouse gases we can get to keep from freezing, that is if the “greenhouse effect” often alluded to is real.

Reduction, or even elimination, of human carbon emissions will have little or no effect on the environment, but if it does it will be bad.

Carbon dioxide is good. It fuels the greening of the planet. If we want to cool the earth, it can be done far more effectively and cheaply by marine cloud whitening, generating huge clouds from the sea.

But, if we do add to the current global cooling trend, we just might wish we hadn’t.