Fossil fuels don’t cause global warming
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This is in response to Jim Greenwood’s Monday letter suggesting U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy is an enemy of the environment. I respect Greenwood’s belief in global warming being caused due to the burning of fossil fuels, but let’s take a look at this with common sense.
Carbon dioxide levels have reportedly reached 400 parts per million. To understand this in layman’s terms, if you filled a backyard swimming pool with 10,000 ping pong balls and colored four of them red, this would represent a concentration of 400 parts per million. How long would it take you to even find those four red ones? And this concentration is going to destroy the planet, as we know it? Water vapor is also classified as a greenhouse gas and its concentration, on average, is 25 times that of carbon dioxide.
Why then are the global temperatures rising, although data for the past 15 years shows this to be much less than predicted by so-called computer climate models? There is only one thing that can cause the Earth to warm or cool, and this has been demonstrated many times in Earth’s history, long before mankind invented the internal combustion engine and burned coal and oil at power plants. And that is the Sun.
As variations in the Sun’s warming effect on the Earth cause the temperature to rise, the temperature of the water in the Earth’s oceans will also rise. Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and contain huge amounts of carbon dioxide in solution. As the ocean waters warm, their ability store gases in solution diminish, hence carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. During periods of cooling, this effect is reversed. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are the result of global temperature fluctuations, not the cause of it.
My grandfather, father and I have worked in the coal and coal-related industries. We will never be ashamed. Politicians who support coal, oil and natural gas should be supported, not referred to as “zombies.” The greatness of this country and the good found in the world are made possible by cheap, reliable and affordable energy, provided by fossil fuels. What would the world be like without them?
Larry Mayton
Fredericktown