To the editor:

A Mar. 10 letter said: “There seems to be a growing consensus that climate change is real and that man (that’s us) has a hand in the negative consequences.”

So are we to cut back on fossil fuel burning? Not really, because man is not the cause of global warming.

Man’s green-house-gas (GHG) emissions of CO2 are insignificant, when stacked up against Ma Nature’s reservoir of CO2 contained in the sea, air and land; a ratio of 2400 to 1.

She has the to ability to recycle CO2 a rate that is over 30 times greater than all the CO2 man injects into the atmosphere. Man’s tiny CO2 accumulations can get eaten up real fast.

The question then is: Is temperature going up because CO2 level is going up? Or, is CO2 going up because earth temperature is going up?

The 40,000 miles of mid-ocean mountain ranges are borderlines of earth’s crust plate movement that injects tremendous heat into the ocean (in some places the water is over 700 degrees), along with volcanic gases like CO2, SO2, etc. We now “real-time” monitor about 300 miles of it off our west coast. Most of the remaining 39,700 miles is un-monitored. So until we get a handle on what this big ‘tank heater’ is doing down there, we certainly should not be touting man-made global warming, especially since rising water temperature will drive out dissolved CO2 at a higher rate into the atmosphere.

The other ‘Tank Heater’ is solar energy. The heat capacity of CO2 near the earth surface is about 23 times less than the sun’s150 watts/sq-meter heat energy at that point. Now consider that about 97 percent of all CO2 in the atmosphere is made by nature, and 3 percent is man-made. So man’s puny 0.195 watts/sq-meter drives us into thermal disaster?

But CO2 in not the biggest GHG player. About 95 percent of GHG effect comes from water vapor. Only about 0.117 percent of GHG effect is due to man-made atmospheric CO2. So water vapor has a lot more clout on climate than we humans.

Long before the Industrial Revolution, we had the Medieval Warm Period, then came the Little Ice Age, now another warm up. It’s a cyclic thing in which sun, volcanoes and cloud cover are the main climate players — not man.

Phil Drietz

Delhi