Listen to the scientists on climate change
As a physicist and as one who has taught a course on climate change at UNLV, I read Jonah Goldberg’s July 16 Viewpoints essay, “Environmentalists are birthing ever more climate-change hype,” with interest. The tragic aspect of our “debate” on climate change is that the people writing for or against the critical issues of climate change, such as Mr. Goldberg, are not scientists.
Yes, the concentration of carbon dioxide on Earth is extremely negligible compared to that on Venus. But what Mr. Goldberg neglects to mention (or understand) is that the Earth’s CO2 concentration was closer to Venus’s billions of years ago when the Earth was forming. The cooling Earth enabled the condensation of water and a dramatic reduction in the CO2 atmospheric level via living and inorganic aqueous-based chemistry over many millions of years, which sequestered that long-lost CO2.
And yes, the Earth is farther away than Venus from the sun (and thus receives less solar flux). But Mercury is the closest to the sun and yet Venus is hotter because of CO2 and the other greenhouse gas blanket that traps heat.
So the critical question we must all ask as human beings is how much higher will we accept the ever-increasing CO2 level in our planet’s atmosphere before we start to tip Earth’s CO2 balance to begin an irreversible return to the “good” old days when the Earth was far too hot for life to form. Scientists are uncertain exactly when this will happen, but do we really want to perform a likely irreversible experiment on our only home?
