Family Security Matters » Publications » Global Warming – er, Climate Change: Brought to You by the Sun

Family Security Matters » Publications » Global Warming – er, Climate Change: Brought to You by the Sun

Global Warming – er, Climate Change: Brought to You by the Sun

John Armor

Did anybody else notice that the phrase “global warming” has largely disappeared from public discourse? All but the slowest environmentalists have dropped that phrase because for the last three years the globe as been cooling off. So, the new phrase is “climate change.”

As a public service, I’d like to explain this phrase by reference to a pair of coal-fired furnaces, one in Birmingham, Alabama, the other one in Baltimore, Maryland. My mother grew up in Birmingham almost a century ago, in a rambling, wood-framed house on Warsaw Street. It had sleeping porches for summer heat, and a coal furnace for winter cold.

There was no thermostat in the house. When you wanted more heat, you went to the basement and stoked the fire. When you wanted less heat, you went down and banked the fire. Either way, the temperature was roughly higher, or lower, after a serious delay.

A full century ago, my father grew up in a row house on South Broadway in Baltimore. It, too, had a coal furnace. The third floor was always the coldest place in the house. I remember that cold from brief but impressive experiences.

The only significant source of heat for this medium-sized planet we live on is the sun. There is a small amount of vestigial heat in the earth itself from its formation millions of years ago, but without the daily input from the sun, the earth would turn into an ice pop with no living things on it within a matter of days.

Now, the sun is a bit more powerful than a coal furnace. The sun is a continuously operating thermonuclear bomb. But there are some similarities. There is no thermostat on earth that controls heat from the sun. And there’s no way to go down to the basement and even crudely adjust its output.

Galileo with his new telescope was the first human to identify and track spots on the sun. Now, we know that when the spots are more active, the radiant heat of the sun is higher. Right now, the spots are at a 17-year low, as I recall. So, that’s the reason the earth is now cooling.

There is also evidence from other planets, especially on Mars where the rovers have outlived their planned lives by years, of both global warming and global cooling similar to that on earth in the past. And there is the minor point that coal-fired generating plants, SUVs, plastic industries, and humans are relatively scarce on Mars.

Bottom line: climate change is normal. It’s been going on for several hundred million years. Those who claim that “we have to do something about climate change” have to do two things before anyone should take them seriously. First, they should explain what kind of thermostat they will put on the wall on earth, to hold temperatures constant within a few degrees, like most modern houses have. Then, they have to explain how that control mechanism will actually affect the radiant heat output on the sun.

While we are on the subject of the sun’s heat on earth, it is true that the warmest period in written history happened around 1100 AD. That’s why Greenland is called Greenland. The Vikings had successful settlements and farms on Greenland, then. But when the earth cooled, the Viking settlements failed. Is it necessary to point out the shameless lack of coal-fired electrical plants and SUVs back in 1100 AD?

There are many situations in which some people and some organizations stand up and shout, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” The necessary responses to that should be, “What is your evidence?” And then, “Exactly what do you propose to do about it?” The global warming crowd now fails the answers to both of those questions. The warming has stopped, and reversed. And even if it hadn’t, nothing they propose would have the slightest effect on the output of the Sun.

Mark Twain addressed the subject a century ago. “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” But worse than that are people who claim to be doing something that cannot work, and will further damage the American economy.

Common sense is always useful, but seldom used. Consider the sun as a giant, coal furnace in a sky. Now you have more knowledge about climate change than many environmentalists, and an unfortunately large number of Congressmen, possess.