Tuesday, April 3, 2007

GETTING HOT IN HERE, OR ME? (ANSWER: YOU)

The papers tell us that the Supreme Court decided yesterday to make a landmark decision involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s need to regulate greenhouse gases. We’re all like, sure, whatever. It’s not like it’s going to do a damn spot of good.

There are conflicting theories as to the causes of global warming. Some believe it involves the trapping of manmade carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, absorbing heat without releasing it. Those fundamentalist Christians who are willing to acknowledge the phenomenon aver that it is caused by the fires of Hell, leaking out of the earth’s crust in a calculated bid on the part of Satan to take the underworld mainstream. Still others think it’s a dragon.

Compelling though these theories are (and leaving quite aside the distasteful “farting cow” hypothesis), they are all distractions from the main issue at hand. You see, it is simply not true that the atmosphere is heating up. On the contrary – the earth itself is cooling down.

Pretty much everyone (except those fundamentalist Christians again) believes that the universe was created in a fiery blast of matter a handful of billennia ago. Fair enough. Consequently, it should be stressed that this fiery blast of matter was HOT – stars needed to be made out of it after all, as well as tropical beaches, Thermador convection ovens, and lust.

So imagine a hot little earth spinning through a cold universe. What’s it going to do? Cool off, of course. Sure it has a molten core that still holds the original warmth of the Big Bang, but there are all sorts of little cracks and wrinkles and zits across the earth’s surface that slowly release this primal torridity into the cosmos. As the ground beneath our feet chills even as we walk upon it, the air around us feels warmer. And it’s not just a matter of human perception – the conflicting pull of the earth and its atmosphere makes all of our equipment go all farblonjet, resulting in the popular illusion of global warming.

So why didn’t this effect make itself clear in previous generations? Easy: there was greater moisture surrounding the earth previously. Every time a rocket or satellite is launched, it takes a little bit of the atmosphere’s moisture along with it, drying the world ever so slightly. In other words, one could say that, in the past, it wasn’t so much the heat as (wait for it) the humidity.

Mainstream scientists will not look kindly upon these conclusions, and that only stands to reason; this is not a very lucrative theory, after all. We apologize if this posting puts Al Gore out of a job, but truth will out.

No comments: