Letters - RE; Mr. Waddell’s recent offering

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Published on Wednesday, June 6, 2018

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Neepawa Banner & Press

RE; Mr. Waddell’s recent offering on global warming, carbon tax and electric vehicles (May 11 edition: Let’s think this through). You say there is no proof that warming is homocentric. You are absolutely correct. It could be a natural cycle.

  From Viking Sagas, British Navy records and modern weather records, we can point to three warming and cooling periods in the last 1100 years. Each cycle lasts about 440 years and is tied to a cycle of sunspot activity. Thus, the “mini ice age” ended about 1850. If the cyclical theory is true, we should cool sharply about 2070. In the longer term Milankovitch cycle, based on the tilt and wobble of the earth on its axis, we should go back to an ice age in somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 years.

You also say global warming is a hoax. But the average temperature over a  half century ending in 1940 was 0 degrees C. at Brandon, Mb. The corresponding number from 1960 to 2010 was 4 degrees C.  According to recent estimates, the temperature during the ice age was probably about minus 10 C. Thus 4 degrees is a very significant change. May I point out that pleasure cruises now carry tourists in the Arctic seas that crushed John Franklin’s ships and those that searched for him. The Arctic ice cap is about half the area that it was 170 years ago. I’m not surprised that you don’t believe.

After all, we still have a flat earth society, whose members don’t believe the earth is round, I’ve also been told that some people believe the jet aircraft circling the earth are gods going to visit each other and that the condensation trails they leave behind are clear evidence that they suffer more from flatulence than we do.

You claim we can do nothing about C02 because of rotting vegetation and volcanoes. Volcanoes produce many kinds of ash and noxious gases, but very little CO2. Because volcanoes generally involve igneous rock, which doesn’t contain much carbon. As for rotting vegetation, I’m quite sure that you were once an Ag-Rep, which I would assume requires a degree in agriculture. So how come you don’t understand the carbon cycle. Briefly, all plants grow by absorbing CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the air and H20 (water) from the soil. In the presence of sunlight, they form hydrocarbons (A.K.A. carbohydrates) and release the oxygen to the atmosphere. When the plant dies or is eaten by an animal, bacteria digest the hydrocarbons by oxidizing them. They return to the air as C02 and H20. It’s a perfect closed cycle with nothing gained and nothing lost. The only “new’ source of atmospheric carbon is the oxidation of fossil fuels, carbon and hydrogen that were sequestered billions of years ago during the

Carboniferous age. Because I still want to address Tory attitudes to fuel efficiency and electric vehicles, I will continue this diatribe at a later date.

To be continued,

Leonard Paramor,

Arden

Editors Note:

Carbon also comes from grass fires, forest fires etc and in spite of the above claim, volcanoes, so oxidation of fossil fuels are not the only “new” source.