From: Noel Taylor
Columbus
I enjoy Michael Greven. He is of keen mind and good heart, and we share many choices in our lives — faith, family, conservation, recycling, food cooperatives and bicycles, to name a few. We’re both drawn to issues of social responsibility and track those issues with regularity.
Michael and I are also different. Perhaps one key area of difference is where we do our listening and reading. Though a gross oversimplification, I’ll venture to label Michael as a National Public Radio listener and myself as a Fox News Network listener, conveniently ignoring the fact that Michael has probably heard Rush Limbaugh before and that I like WFIU Bloomington.
Michael writes of his confidence in the Union for Concerned Scientists (UCS). I’m open about my confidence in the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), viewing the UCS as giving the media an excuse to peddle doom and the GWPF as calling for balance and restraint. After careful review, I find that the UCS still holds to outdated research models and that the GWPF has been instrumental in revealing flaws in those models, as well as offering more accurate ones.
I share Michael’s concern for our children and our children’s children. When hormone-changing pesticides, herbicides and pharmaceuticals show up in our drinking water, and violence becomes mainstream, there are many good reasons for that concern. However, I do not see climate change as one of them.
Perhaps it would interest Michael to learn that the GWPF reports research showing global cooling since 1997 and an upswing in ocean ice and polar ice cap thickness, all while the United Nations is trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of developed countries in the form of carbon taxes to pay for the alleged inherent sins against nature (not to mention against the Third World) of being developed.
I think Michael will agree with me that no currently corporate human, he and I included, knows what’s happening tomorrow, let alone 10, 20 or 100 years from now. What I do know is that some well-known glaciers are receding faster than my hairline while many others are growing faster than my beard. I know just by looking at Boston’s Back Bay area and the Netherlands that neither is any more under water than it was 100 years ago. I also remember what I was taught in seventh-grade science class — that the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the faster and more luxuriant is plant growth. I even remember that Mount St. Helens alone blew more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in one day in 1980 than mankind has emitted since Adam. Therefore I’m inclined to believe the scientists who assert that the current increase in global carbon dioxide is vital to the agriculture needed to feed our growing world population. We can tax that, too.
