Dawn Ritch, Contributor
IN AN old British nursery rhyme about the evils of rumour-mongering, Henny Penny was under an oak tree when an acorn fell on her head. She promptly decided that the sky was falling and that she'd better rush to tell the King.
Along the way she met her friends, Cocky Locky, Goosie Lucie, Turkey Lurkie, and Ducky Lucky. One by one, everybody decided they'd go with her to tell the King. Then they came upon Foxy Locksy, who said he knew a short-cut to the palace, but instead led them into a big, dark cave from which they never emerged.
Governments worldwide have accepted scientists' warnings that they must cut carbon dioxide emissions. The burning of fossil fuels is blamed for the rise in the earth's temperature. A global average temperature rise of 0.6C over the past century has been measured by scientists. This is predicted to exceed 20 by 2100.
The rise has partly melted the North Pole, Greenland and Antarctica, made British winters warmer, caused more frequent hurricanes and cyclones, as well as flooding in the United States.
The world's major powers therefore met recently in Europe to try to agree on emission standards for vehicles and factories and other activities. But the meeting broke up in disarray. Britain, which had been a co-chair along with the Dutch, was the first to walk out. The U.S. produces by far the most carbon dioxide emissions, but is known to be nervous about the effects of China's industrialisation. With far more people and territory than either the U.S. or the U.K., were China really to accelerate her economic development, the theory is that the earth would be covered in a blanket of smoke that would block the sun's light.
New scientific evidence, however, shows that global warming is caused mainly by the sun. The research, some of it by the European Space Agency (ESA), uses satellite and other astronomical data to show that earlier computer models severely under-estimated the impact of the sun.
Writing in the U.K.'s Sunday Times, Science Editor Jonathan Leake said that much of the data on the sun's role in global warming was gathered by ESA's sun-watching Soho satellite.
Paal Brekke, Soho's deputy project scientist, said the results could change thinking on climate. "Taxing carbon based fuels may be good for other reasons but our evidence suggests it will not be much help in keeping the Earth cool," he said.
Global warming
Global warming is caused by the Earth's atmosphere acting like the glass of a greenhouse. The air lets light through but prevents the heat generated when it hits the ground from being radiated back into space. The main cause had seemed to be the 30 per cent rise in carbon dioxide levels since pre-industrial times from fossil fuels burnt by motor vehicles, power stations and other activities.
The sun's role was considered secondary. Scientists previously calculated that the sun radiates only 0.7 per cent more energy than 150 years ago, causing about a tenth of global warming. Brekke and others say the models underestimated the three per cent UV (ultraviolet) light increase over the same period, generating extra ozone that locks more heat into the atmosphere."
These studies therefore show, as the Sunday Times reports, that the main reason for global warming is not the burning of fossil fuel, but a solar energy surge and a particularly big increase in UV light over the past century. This has also coincided with a doubling in strength of the sun's magnetic field.
What this means is that even if the U.S. and all other developed countries were to agree to limit their carbon dioxide emissions at the astronomical public and private cost this entails, it wouldn't make much difference to global warming.
These findings also have a potential political impact. The belief that fossil fuels caused global warming has been the justification for huge taxes and tax increases on petroleum products around the world. Now it seems that all they do is aggravate our respiratory ailments.
At the recent global conference the U.S.A. pushed the use of trade in green credits. If my country has lots of forest that feed on carbon dioxide, then I can trade my credits with your country which has lots of smoke stacks, and the planet will be safe, because one cancels out the other. But not the people a mile downwind of the stack, or the ones beside the smoking vehicles.
Having warned for years therefore, that the sky was falling and the planet was baking because of fossil fuels, American rumour-mongering could lead the earth's inhabitants into a big, dark cave from which they're unlikely to emerge. Trading green credits would be a possible solution to global warming if fossil fuels were to blame. But they aren't.
The burning of fossil fuels is a problem to those who breathe the earth's atmosphere. And trading green credits for that is like getting eaten by the fox.
