Thoughts about Global Warming

by

Gerald Plessner

February 9, 2007 - I have never understood the controversy over global warming. To me, the issues is quite simple.

Human beings have been on this planet for a small part of its existence --- perhaps a few thousand, or even a million years. For most of that time they were hunter-gatherers, eating what they could pull off trees or kill with a club or rock.

When they learned how to plant, cultivate and grow food, they could stay in one place, creating things of permanence. They could have more children who would help in the hard work of surviving.

With the change from hunter-gatherer to farmer, human population doubled in a relatively short time. Because people stayed in one place communities evolved and people could developed specialized skills. Manufacturing developed and people took up trades. Over time, villages became towns and towns became cities.

When the Industrial Revolution began in the early 18^th century --- just a few hundred years ago --- everything changed. Rudimentary forms of mass production developed. Steam engines were invented to drive big equipment, and they required fuel. So coal was mined and trees were cut down, eliminating many primordial forests.

The concentration of workers and their families into larger cities and the transportation of raw materials and finished products required transit that burned fuel. First wood and coal were used for steam engines, to be replaced by gasoline and oil for trains and, ultimately, for trucks.

New methods of cultivation using farm animals resulted in the destruction of more forests for farmland. The clearing of forests, about which there is concern today, actually began hundreds of years ago.

Of course our planet has always experienced cycles of heat and drought, cold and freezing. But those periods changed in a natural way, over much longer periods of time.

The truth is that, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the massive use of fuel for power, warmth and ultimately transportation, changed everything.

To suggest --- as those who dispute the idea of global warming do --- that what is happening to out planet today is merely another swing in the earth's pendulum of hot and cold is, in my opinion, absurd. The fact of the Industrial Revolution, the development of motorized transportation and its pollution of the atmosphere, make a lie of the idea that there is no problem.

Those who argue that we should do nothing, letting nature take its course, either care about money over everything else, or care little for the gift that their God or Evolution have given them. They also care little about the future of their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren.

Those who are taken in by the malignant nonsense that there is no such thing as Global Warming, are either innocents, fools or ideological zealots who will never believe anything that contradicts their ideology or their prejudice.

It's that simple.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gerald Plessner is a Southern California businessman who writes regularly on issues of politics and culture. He would be pleased to hear from you and may be contacted at gerald@geraldplessner.com. To receive his commentaries go to maillist-subscribe@geraldplessner.com.