Just now Luke brought me the Borderline World Geography card game and we are sitting here playing for high stakes - who gets to choose the kind of cookies we make this afternoon. We just finished reading Around the World in a Hundred Years: From Henry the Navigator to Magellan by Jean Fritz - a very interesting book for both of us. Also in our Earth Science class, that I teach Luke and four other kids, we are making maps of the physical geography features of each continent. We downloaded black line maps from the internet and are filling them in.
One of the maps is a projection of the Pacific Ocean like you are looking at a globe from slightly below the level of the equator. It is bordered by Antarctica on the south, Asia on the west, and the Americas on the east, of course. But what interested me is that, from this projection, almost no land is visible. It strikes me as ridiculous to think that humans could be responsible for global climate change, when we're barely even in half of the picture. Actually, over 77% of the earth is covered with water, and of the land, only 4 percent is urban and suburban use, so less than 1% of the total surface of the earth is "peopled." Another 25% of the land is in agriculture, but that may actually reduce CO2 output since people are growing plants where, in many places, not much was growing before, and the plants take in CO2 (I'll have to see what studies have been done on this.)
It seems like if we are looking for a cause for climate change, we should look at really BIG stuff, like the thermo-nuclear reactor in the core of the earth, our enormous sun, the oceans, etc. Not us puny humans.
Quinn just brought me his BYU Physical Science book, wanting to go over the answers to the end-of-chapter questions. One of them was discussing how we know what we think we know, and mentioned Occam's Razor, which essentially states that when confronted with equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, choose the simplest one. Anthropomorphic climate change flunks that test. As William M. Gray, professor of atmospheric science and meteorologist at Colorado State University says: “Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential...."
BTW -- Luke beat me at Borderline. Maybe I shouldn't multi-task so much.
