LETTER: Carbon dioxide not a big deal

Dear Editor,

Global warming has been one of the favorite scare tactics of the extreme environmental movement for some time. According to them, the Earth is warming, the polar ice caps are melting and soon we will either be under water or living in an inhospitable desert. All of this, they claim, is due to man’s inability to control his consumption. We are all doomed, they say, unless we stop production of “greenhouse gasses.”

Carbon dioxide is spoken of as the most dangerous of greenhouse gases, and environmental activists, some on this campus, viciously attacked President Bush for his unwillingness to continue with Clinton-era plans for severely reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Those restrictions would have caused severe harm to our society, but the environmentalists claim it is worth it to preserve our planet.

Well, now it turns out that carbon dioxide may not be causing global warming. According to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, carbon dioxide emissions cannot be the primary cause behind global warming. The reason is that most of the increase in temperature in the last century happened in the very early parts of the century, before carbon dioxide emissions really began to increase.

So, for those of you who fell prey to environmental rhetoric, that President Bush was going to kill all of us by not continuing harsh restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, rest easy. According to scientists, not environmental extremists, most of the warming we have seen is natural, not a precursor to a man-made destruction of life on this planet.

Jeremy Kidd