Letter: Don’t blame CO2

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I have taken note that of late the editor of The Daily Astorian is pushing this hoax, “global warming.” He makes a statement to the effect that global warming is almost universally accepted, and well it should be, with every media outlet singing its praises, and an endless number of shills with respected names in science and other fields lending their names to it.

Let me be blunt. I am tired of the editor, and others, bashing and vilifying my favorite gas, carbon dioxide. It can put out fires, keep things really cold, it is the breath of life to my chlorophyllic friends and it is the bubbles in my beer.

Now let us take a close long look at the oyster. It has been around a long while. How long? Before the dinosaurs, I think. Back in dinosaur days, carbon dioxide made up 12 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. Today it makes up only 0.04 percent. One would think if acid from carbon dioxide was keeping oysters from forming shells, they would have been extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Just what acid is it that carbon dioxide is forming? The only common acid I know formed readily by carbon dioxide is carbonic acid. Carbonic acid is so weak I am not sure that it would lower the pH of sea water. If it can, it will take quite a stack of it to affect the oceans of the world appreciably. In fact, one might expect that animals like oysters, who require carbonate to make their shells, would be delighted with a little more carbonate in their sea water.

One cannot deny that the Earth is warming up, nor that man is having his effect on Earth. We’ve made ozone holes that threaten to make the planet uninhabitable to thin-skinned species like homo sapiens.

The biggest thing we have created is a garbage dump. Unfortunately, we have not stopped with just one. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been lost to nuclear contamination. We are driving other species to extinction faster than it has ever been done before. What one cannot say is that man is responsible for the warming of the Earth. We are trying, but I don’t think we are succeeding.

According to the good folks who document these things, the Earth has been warming up for more than 20,000 years, and we are nearly there. Probably, man didn’t yet know how to start fires back when the cycle started. The Earth has done this many times in the past. The polar bear has been through it all before. The oyster has been through it many times. Civilized man has not.

I don’t think we need to worry about the oyster or the polar bear, we should start worrying about ourselves, instead of running around like chickens with their heads cut off, claiming carbon dioxide is going to melt the ice caps, create horrible storms and raise ocean levels.

These things will happen. They are not dependent on carbon dioxide, nor are they the worst of our coming troubles.