Climate Shift Theory

Dear Editor:

The best way to keep the climate from getting any warmer is to reduce humanity’s output of CO2. Right?

But the effort to keep the climate from changing is a task of the same magnitude as that of stopping earthquakes, with exactly the same prospect of success. Considering the relative masses of humanity and world, a certain amount of hubris, not to say anthropocentrism, will be required.

On the other hand, warming factors lie perhaps not in a CO2 cause —which is not rigorously proven—but rather in astronomy: orbit, tilt, wobble, cyclical confluence, and solar activity (with its uncertain regularities).

Turning to the last previous global warming, said to have peaked around 1100 A.D. followed by a Little Ice Age (nadir 1725), it isn’t difficult to draw a climate cycle of 1250 years, with a crossover point from the cold half-cycle to the warm one coming up, say, in 2038, proceeding then to a warm peak around 2350—probably no hotter than the last one, with once again no presence of coco palms on the steppe.

If warming and cooling of the northern hemisphere are cyclical, which seems quite plausible, it would follow that little or none of it is caused by human activity.

Under the Cap and Trade bill, which addresses CO2 emissions exclusively, it appears that only the West is expected to use its resources for the sole predictable result, namely global economic leveling.

Yet the one realistic benefit worth mentioning will be a sidebar reduction of real pollution, together with the essential but unpopular CO2.
Evan J. Wright
KENT LAkES