Jury out on reason for warming Earth

According to NASA, the carbon dioxide level has never been above 300 parts a million for 650,000 years prior to the 1950s

CLIMATE CHANGE: Wild storms just north of the Sunshine Coast. Picture: Mitchell Bow

BECAUSE David Harris (QT 13/01) claims I have a view on everything and that I am out of my depth and because I learned yesterday from my four-year-old granddaughter while reading a Dr Seuss book that "my head is full of brains and my shoes are full of feet" I will try with Dr Seuss' help to get into the 21st century.

Now I am sure that David would agree with NASA that carbon dioxide levels for the past 650,000 years show this recent increase is man-made. Well, I do not agree with it.

According to NASA, the carbon dioxide level has never been above 300 parts a million for 650,000 years prior to the 1950s.

Yet now it's 380ppm, showing the increase is due to man's activity since the industrial revolution.

Now firstly, could David please explain to me why NASA scientists and other proponents of global warming are only looking at the past 650,000 years when they believe that Earth is billions of years old.

Take Science, volume 332, page 430, of April 22dealing with past climate variations concerning the Eocene period (allegedly 34-56 million years ago): "Although the global physiography of the Eocene was broadly similar to that of the modern Earth, the climate was vastly different.

Polar regions lacked major ice sheets and were home to cold-intolerant plants and animals, and tropical oceans steamed away at temperatures approaching 40C.

These differences were driven at least in part by atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations about five times the pre-industrial value."

Anti-creationist geologist professor Ian Plimer has researched sources of carbon dioxide.

In Sydney, on April 11, 2007, he claimed "about 0.1 per cent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide was due to human activity and much of the rest to little understood geological phenomena".

So David, over to you.

GLENDA CARROLL

Bundamba