GLOBAL WARMING

A COUNTY LINE CAUCUS PRESENTATION

Do you remember the old children’s fable, the story of “Henny Penny”?  This children’s fable could well be a cautionary social or political tale today. 

When an acorn falls on her head, Henny Penny jumps to a conclusion that the sky is falling goes running and squawking to Turkey Lurkey, Loosey Goosey, Ducky Lucky, and whips all of them into mass hysteria.  They end up going to the clever fox who agrees that the falling sky is a catastrophe and offers them a way out if they will follow him.  They, of course, will do anything to stop the falling sky and they follow him.  He leads them directly to his den where his entire family is waiting for him to bring them their dinner - which this is!

When I decided to prepare a Caucus presentation on Global Warming about a year ago, I was what you might call a Global warming ‘agnostic’.  I was definitely a skeptic but the manner in which the subject was approached, by those I considered to be smarter than I, was “Hurry Henny Penny, the sky is falling!” caused me to think that I’d better believe, follow and support whatever those smarter people suggested to halt the change and save the earth before it reached a ‘tipping’ point from which it could never be saved.

This kind of charge really tends to focus your attention and tends to reduce your skepticism.  So, out of fear, I - like many others - was beginning to accept the ‘fact’ of manmade global warming and that something must be done immediately or we would very soon, as ‘they’ said, reach that point of no return and life as we know it would cease to exist and there would, then, be nothing we could do about it.  It would be too late!

In other words, “The sky is falling”.  We don’t have time to think about it, we must act NOW!

Since then, I have seen that same rational, the same scare tactics, used in numerous instances by both political parties:

1. Our recession averting stimulus package - we don’t have time to read and understand it, we must act NOW!
2. The housing collapse - If we don’t stop the hemorrhaging immediately, the global financial/ investment structure will fail!
3. The health care reform in the USA - This must be approved immediately or our deficit will be beyond our abilities to control it and people will die.
4. The global warming charges - we are fast approaching the tipping point at which it will be impossible to reverse the global warming trend.  We don’t have time to question it, we must ACT NOW!

President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," and"This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."  And, if there IS no crisis, they have to make enough people think that there is one! 

So, I’ll begin by reviewing some of the things that we, or at least I, can accept - until serious doubts can be planted by a lot more people that I respect.

Age of earth                             4.5 billion years (approximately - plus or minus 3 or 4 years) round - approximately - last I knew - though some will probably still disagree.

Recurring glaciers and ice ages   for the last 3 billion years - approximately.

The last ice age                      We’re still in it!

We’re in the Quaternary glaciation, also known as the Pleistocene glaciation, the current ice age or simply the ice age, refers to the period of the last few million years (2.58 Ma to present) in which permanent ice sheets were established in Antarctica and perhaps Greenland and fluctuating ice sheets have occurred elsewhere.

Currently, the earth is in an interglacial period, which marked the beginning of the Holocene epoch. The current interglacial began between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, which caused the ice sheets from the last glacial period to begin to disappear. Remnants of these last glaciers, now occupying about 10% of the world's land surface, still exist in Greenland and Antarctica.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation