March 28, 2008 03:11 am
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I think that it was P.T. Barnum who said “you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool some people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Is the world coming to an end because we use carbon?
Carbon is one of the most plentiful and useful elements in our world. We burn it to produce electricity, it fuels our vast transportation system, it is in practically every bit of food we eat, it becomes part of every living thing. It is an essential part of the conversion of energy from the sun green plants use to grow the food that makes life possible, through a process of photosynthesis.
Every time it rains, water mixed with carbon dioxide, sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen and all other contaminates that air contains become fertilizer to our plants.
For example, a corn crop of 150 bushels per acre will digest carbon dioxide, using the carbon in the plant, releasing about 12 tons of oxygen back into the atmosphere. This is the way that soil has been built for millions of years. All green plants, and even algae in the water, will do the same thing.
Mother Nature has the greatest recycling system ever created.
Yet we have people who fear that carbon is going to be the end of the world. They claim that it will form a sort of capsule around the earth that will keep the heat in and cause global warming. They say using coal, diesel, fuel or gas in our cars, will cause the world to come to an end.
There are a few questions that we should ask before we accept that conclusion.
Is man the biggest culprit in putting carbon into the air — no. The United Nations “experts” tell us that animals, through their digestive process, put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all of man’s activities.
Volcanoes produce more pollutants every year than all of man’s activities. When the Tambora volcano in the east Indies blew in 1815, it took five years to clear the air. When the forest fires were burning in California last fall, a forestry manager pointed out that the fire would put more carbon into the air than man did in an entire year.
Methane, produced by decaying vegetation, releases more carbon dioxide than man does every year. Man’s activities produce less than 3 percent of the carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere.
How much of mankinds’ 3 percent can we eliminate? Can we stop heating our houses and still live in Minnesota? We may be able to go back to burning wood, corn, etc., but we’d probably put more carbon into the atmosphere than before. We can use smaller, more-efficient cars. The higher price of gas has encouraged people to drive more efficient vehicles even without a law.
Should we go without electricity in our life in the name of saving the world from carbon? I heard Rep. Jim Oberstar, chairman of a sub-committee dealing with global warming, posed the question, “What would the effect be if we paid someone down in Nicaragua to keep the trees producing oxygen rather than cutting them down?”
What he doesn’t understand is that only green growing plants produce oxygen.
When a tree dies in the forest it starts to decay, and become a user of oxygen rather than a producer. Cut the logs, build a home, plant another tree and you have sequestered the carbon in the log as long as the house lasts. We don’t have to pay a tax on our coal and gas, and the fellow in Nicaragua has a better home as well.
In the United States today, we are feeding over 300 million people a far better diet than the less than 1 million who lived here in 1492. We supply 75 percent of the world’s exportable grain while at the same time we have land that has been placed in reserve partly due to the elements, like carbon, nitrogen sulfur falling from the sky mixed with rain. They fertilize the land and the sea, helping us to produce these surpluses.
Is global warming the apocalypse that has been forecasted for years?
The so-called experts tell us that the temperature has risen by almost one degree in the last 100 years. That means in my lifetime it has gone up about four-fifths of one degree.
Every person I’ve ever talked to, in my travels, thinks that we’re nuts for living in Minnesota — the “ice box” state. Thank goodness I’ve never met a polar bear in my back yard.
I think we should worry more about peoples’ welfare and less about the bear’s. Let’s start using the tremendous amount of coal that we have and start drilling for that off-shore oil.
We should worry more about the $4 gas and what it is doing to our economy.
This commentary was submitted by Alfred Schumann of Eyota.
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