Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Do Dirty Coal Fired Plants Really Mitigate Global Warming? (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | Casting about for an explanation for why temperatures have actually cooled since 1998, global warming alarmists have come out with a study that suggests that Chinese coal fired plants are actually cooling the Earth, according to the U.K. Telegraph.

The idea is that the Chinese plants are pumping sulfur into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, and thus counteracting the effects of carbon dioxide that global warming alarmists claim is causing man made global warming.

Critics of the global warming theory suggest that the study tweaked what they call an "out of date model" in order to get "desired results."

The idea that sulfur acts as an anti global warming agent is not new. Volcanic activity pumps sulfur into the upper atmosphere, blocking sun light, and thus cooling Earth's temperatures. 1816, the "year without summer," was caused by the eruption of the Tamboro volcano east of Java.

Nathan Myhrvold, a former technology officer at Microsoft, suggested as a stop gap measure for dealing with global warming, deliberately pumping sulfur into the upper atmosphere in order to mitigate its effects.

The study, cited in the U.K. Telegraph, demonstrates once again the difficulty of predicting trends in climate over the long term and hence the folly of committing the world to public policy initiative based on those dubious predictions. If one were to take the study at face value, the logical conclusion might be that the nations of the world should encourage the production of dirty, coal fired plants. Of course no politician is going to seriously make such a suggestion.

In any case, policy ideas, such as clamping down on fossil fueled energy and forcing people to practice conservation should be looked upon with skepticism in any event. The net effect of such policies may or may not have any effect on the climate. But they will certainly have an effect on both the expansion of the size of government and the contraction of human freedom.

People who proposed massive disruptions in the economic order of the world in order to deal with a crisis need to be able to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the crisis actually exists. Trotting out a study that coal fired plants, thought to be tools of the devil by environmentalists, have a beneficial effect on mitigating that crisis is certainly not going to help the cause in any way.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/environment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110713/us_ac/8755501_do_dirty_coal_fired_plants_really_mitigate_global_warming

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