Climate Alarmism

                No, Henny Penny, the sky is not falling – and if it were, there’s not a damned thing you could do about it anyhow, because it wouldn’t be your fault.

               Awright everybody, I’m getting sick and damned tired of hearing about how we need to “reduce our carbon footprint” and all the plans for “carbon sequestration” and reduction of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and how we’re “killing the planet.”  Let’s get a few things out in the open, shall we?

-      -    The planet’s climate is cyclic.  Ice ages and hot periods alternate, and that’s been going on for eons.  It will continue on, until Sol explodes and Terra no longer exists.

-       -   The planet’s climate is driven by solar cycles.  Specifically, sunspot cycles.  I’m not saying that anthropogenic atmospheric global warming isn’t happening – but I will categorically state that we do not have anywhere near as great an effect as we’re being told we have.  At least, not in terms of carbon.  More on that in a bit.

-        -  Carbon dioxide may be a greenhouse gas, but its concentration in the atmosphere is measured it parts per million.  And, typically, less than 1,000 ppm.  Just for perspective, 1% concentration = 10,000 ppm.  Chew on that.  Then consider there have been whole epochs in Terran history where the proportion of CO₂ has been much higher in the atmosphere, but the global mean temperatures have been lower.  I’ll get to that in a bit, too.

-        -  Now, everyone wants us to cut CO­₂.  This is flawed thinking.  Why?  Carbon dioxide is what plants live on.  This means that there will be less CO₂ available for plants to perform photosynthesis with, so less to make oxygen output with, less food (produce) to grow, and less feed to grow food (livestock.)  Think there may be an agenda at work?  Chew on it for a bit.

-        -  You know what the bigger driver of heat retention – at least, in the atmosphere – is?  Water vapour.  That’s right – good ol’ H₂­O.  Humidity.  Cloud cover.  But, we can’t live without at least some humidity in the atmosphere – so what can be done?  I think that perhaps some windtraps could be set up to catch water from the air in regions of very high humidity.  But, we can’t get rid of it all – we’re just evolved to live with some humidity in the air, and we don’t want the entire planet to look like the Sahara now, do we?

-        -  Now, earlier, I said that atmospheric anthropogenic global warming wasn’t happening – at least, not to the degree we’re being told (the sky is most definitely not falling.  We don’t need to eat lab-grown “meet” cultured from “immortalized” (cancer) cells.  And don’t get me started on plant-based synthetic meat – if you want to eat a hamburger, just eat the damned hamburger.  And get your wooden imposters in the produce section where they belong!  However, there is much heat retention at the Terran surface that is anthropogenic in nature.  All this blacktop pavement, and all the asphalt shingles and dark composition rooftops all do a wonderful job of retaining heat (concrete pavement retains much less – yes, it still get hot to the touch, but it doesn’t retain anywhere near as much heat energy as asphalt does.)  All these roads, and all these roofs?  They cause a lot of heat to be retained at the surface – and there is your anthropogenic global warming!  All the new construction, and all the new roads?  Just add to it.

So, then, what can be done?  How can we resolve this?

-        -  Definitely need to plant more trees and greenery.  Not just for the other half of the respiration cycle, and not just for food purposes, but because it helps to increase the albedo of the planet’s surface, reflecting more heat away, and therefore helping to lower global mean temperatures.

-        -  Change pavement being used.  More cement, less asphalt.  We’ll have to figure out another way to use petroleum bottoms, or just store them somewhere like we do with radioactive waste (don’t throw it away – future generations may figure out a use for them.  But, put them where they won’t cause any trouble at present.)

-        -  Perhaps we could stand to reduce CO₂ emissions, but not to the extreme that the alarmists want us to reach, and “net zero” may not be strictly necessary.  We need to plant more greenery, which will make “net zero” easier to reach – because plants must be included in the figures.  And CO₂ is what plants eat.  And, it’s what they use to make oxygen for us.  Net zero isn’t the greatest idea we’ve ever come up with, we need to make sure we can keep plants in the equation, and any excessive industrial or anthropogenic CO₂ emissions can be made up for by planting greenspaces – which we damned well should be doing anyhow.

-        -  Change roofing materials.  Instead of composition, asphalt shingles, and tarpaper; come up with a suitable replacement for tarpaper that is lighter in colour (very heavily waxed Kraft?) and use slate instead?  Or figure out how to lighten the colour of shingles – significantly.

-        -  Set up windtraps and dew catchers in more humid regions of the world.  We don’t want to change the climate of these regions, we just want to reduce the humidity a bit – say, by 10% rh or so?  This should help bring the global mean temperatures down just a touch.

Anybody out there have any other ideas?  This is a topic I’d love to discuss – but please, no leftist yakking points that are impractical to respond to, unlikely to consider, and really aren’t anything more than mere talking points anyhow.  I have yet to hear anything come out of an environmentalist’s mouth that was a practical, defensive position that had a logical and realistic basis and approach to at least one facet of the problem.  If you can come up with something that you can actually defend in a rational manner, let’s kick it around a bit and see what happens!