Contributors
Chuck DeVore- Contributor

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore represents Orange County California’s 70th Assembly District.. He served as a Reagan White House appointee in the Pentagon from 1986 to 1988 and was Senior Assistant to Cong. Chris Cox. He is a Major in the Army National Guard. Chuck’s novel, CHINA ATTACKS, sells internationally and has been translated into Chinese for sales in Taiwan. [go to DeVore index]

Global Warming And The Kerry Meltdown
The candidate and greenhouse gases…
[Chuck DeVore] 6/23/04

It’s June, five months to go to the November election.

Jobs are blossoming, rendering Senator John Kerry’s comments to the contrary an increasingly irrelevant rant.

The terrorists are acting like terrorists, reminding everyone (except the Germans, Spaniards, and half of the Democrat Party), that this war is global and that Kerry-inspired retreat from Iraq is tantamount to defeat.

And Senator John McCain has embraced President Bush, graphically splitting asunder the silly musings of a press corps being spoon fed “McCain for VP” rumors by the Kerry for President camp.

What’s left for Kerry to run on? Increase the minimum wage? (Presumably to one million dollars an hour so we can all be rich and Kerry can tax us into prosperity.) Rail against outsourcing? (Kerry should know, his wife’s company employs thousands of foreigners overseas.) How about global-warming? (It’s always hot within five miles of an Al Gore speech, so we may have a possibility here.)

I predict global-warming will take center stage as the Kerry campaign melts down this summer. Kerry’s rhetoric will rise to AlGorian heat levels as the statistically inevitable happens and local temperature records fall in various cities around America.

Seriously, what of global-warming? Can America stop it? Should we try?

We know that a good portion of the Democratic Party believes that global-warming is made in America. These folks want America to sign the Kyoto global-warming treaty, requiring us to park the SUV and cut energy use by about 30 percent in six years to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Assuming we were to impoverish ourselves and return to the economic levels of yesteryear, what would we accomplish climatically? (Aside from admittedly blessed silence from Al Gore?)

How about three hundreds of one percent (0.03%) of total greenhouse gas levels? That’s the reduction we could expect by writing off almost one-third of our economy (while doing nothing to cut emissions in China, India and the rest of the developing world).

This Western sacrifice would net us a global temperature reduction of about “one-twentieth of a degree by 2050" according to noted Atmospheric physicist Fred Singer.

Why so little an impact? Well, about 95 percent of the greenhouse effect comes from water vapor, all but one-one thousandths of one percent (0.001%) of which is naturally occurring. The other five percent of the greenhouse derives from carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other gases, most of which are naturally produced.

In fact, life on planet Earth without the greenhouse effect would be unbearable, with average global temperatures right around freezing.

All of this debate about greenhouse gases and how much noble environmental socialism we need to save ourselves from greedy American capitalism omits talk of one huge driver of our climate: the Sun.

Scientists know that the nearest star to Earth follows a well-observed 10-12 year solar cycle. These short cycles feature slight variations in energy output that shift global weather patterns to a significant extent (even if global temperature averages stay the same). More significantly, we now know the Sun’s energy output is constantly changing on a more long term cycle – perhaps as much as 500 or more years.

NASA Solar scientist Dr. Drew Shindell wrote this year that, “…it is clear that solar variability seems much more likely (than volcanoes) to have driven the large regional climate changes seen in historical data.”

Hold the presses! If a reduction in the output of the Sun may have been responsible for the Little Ice Age during the 15th to the 18th centuries, then might an increase in solar output be responsible for some of the global warming seen in recent decades? Data from NASA would suggest yes (which might explain the significant global-warming observed on Mars recently – a location yet free from Al Gore speeches or any other human deprivations).

As for global-warming on Earth, I’m still waiting for the AlGorian heating effect to precipitate a Kerry meltdown.CRO

Chuck DeVore is the Republican nominee in the 70th State Assembly District. www.ChuckDeVore.com

copyright 2004 Chuck DeVore