As many as 350 thousand people, emitting as much as 225
metric tons per day of carbon dioxide, converged on New York City late last
month to take part in the People’s Climate March, protesting carbon dioxide and
its terrible effects on the planet.
Among those present were climate activist and actor Leonardo
DiCaprio and climate alarmist and former US Vice President Al Gore, who arrived
separately by private jet.
Also on-hand were billionaire environmental activist Tom
Steyer from California, US Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sheldon
Whitehouse of Rhode Island, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. The peaceful protest
snarled traffic and left thousands of pounds of trash in its wake.
Speaking at a nearby conference, US Secretary of State John
Kerry likened the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, at levels with
which he is not comfortable, to the threats of Ebola in West Africa and Islamic
extremists in the Middle East, saying global warming “…has even greater
longer-term consequences that can cost hundreds of billions, trillions of
dollars, lives, and the security of the world.”
You don’t have to take his word for it, Kerry said, or Al
Gore’s. “You can just wake up pretty much any day and listen to Mother Nature,
who is screaming at us about it.”
Well, it is an election year, after all.
Meanwhile, out West, cooler heads prevail. A study on the
effects of all those protesters breathing carbon dioxide on our screaming earth
has determined it’s really only natural. According to the new NOAA-sponsored
study by two former University of Washington scientists, the rise in
temperatures along the West Coast over the past century is almost entirely due
to naturally occurring environmental forces, not human emissions of greenhouse
gases.
Nate Mantua, now with NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries
Science Center, and Jim Johnstone, formerly with the UW’s Joint Institute for
the Study of the Atmosphere and Oceans, published the study in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
The study says wind – specifically natural, wind-driven
climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean, such as El Niño and the Pacific Decadal
Oscillation – is responsible for more than 80 percent of the warming from
Northern California to the Pacific Northwest.
Changes in ocean circulation as a result of weaker winds were
the main cause of about 1 degree Fahrenheit of warming in the northeast Pacific
Ocean and nearby coastal land between 1900 and 2012, according to the analysis
of ocean and air temperatures over that time.
The authors determined that those temperatures would have
been different if global warming had been the most powerful influence on land
and sea temperatures. Most of the warming in the region occurred before 1940,
when greenhouse gas concentrations were lower and winds were weaker, the study
found. In contrast, winds have strengthened since 1980 and coastal ocean
cooled, even as the rise in greenhouse gases has accelerated.
“It’s a simple story, but the results are very surprising: We
do not see a human hand in the warming of the West Coast,” said co-author Nate
Mantua. “That is taking people by surprise, and may generate some blowback.”
Blowback indeed. While most of us aren’t surprised at the
findings, it remains to be seen how this new information will affect the
maritime industry and the millions (or billions) of dollars it spends annually
in an effort to reduce its carbon footprint. To be sure, the reduction of
pollutants is an important and worthy goal, but only if those pollutants are
actually known to be hazardous.
It turns out, then, that carbon dioxide, in spite of having
been classed as a hazard to human health by the Environmental Protection
Agency, probably isn’t as bad as Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore and John Kerry
might think. The concern over the effects of man-caused carbon dioxide may turn
out to be a tempest in a teapot compared to what Mother Nature can throw at us
all by herself.
