Worthless proposal

To the Editor:

A March 13 Sentinel editorial stated: “It’s not even clear [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Walz’s plan would do any good in reducing ‘global warming.'” That’s an understatement.

Man’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions of carbon dioxide are insignificant when stacked up against Mother Nature’s reservoir of CO2 contained in the sea, air and land. The ratio is 2,400 to 1. Mother Nature has the 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 inject tremendous heat into the ocean. In some places the water is more than 700 degrees. They also spew out 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’s surface is about 23 times less than the sun’s 150 watts/square 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/square 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, and now another warmup. It’s a cyclic thing in which sun, volcanoes and cloud cover are the main climate players — not man.

In summary, Minnesota’s proposed H.F.700 S.F.850 legislation to reduce CO2 emissions is totally worthless for reducing global warming.

Phil Drietz

Delhi

Government alters data

To the Editor:

I would like to share information from Tony Heller’s YouTube video “The Green New Deal.” The 2017 NASA temperature graph (verses the 1999) shows changing data for years before 1979 by cooling those years by about 1 degree. As an example, the 1934 “dust bowl” used to be the hottest year. On the 1999 graph, the average on all U.S. recording stations for 1934 was 54.2 F. The new graph “cools” this to 53.2 F.

Since 1990, the U.S. temperature data has been increasingly “estimated.” The estimated data is marked with an “E.” In 1990, 20 percent of data was estimated. This increased to 25 percent by 2007, 33 percent by 2014, 38 percent by 2017, 41 percent in 2018 and 61 percent for the month of January 2019. It turns out that these stations have “created” recent years as the hottest in the record. 2017 had 0.2 degrees added to become 53.4. This now is hotter than the dust bowl year of 1934. This record heat is blamed on increased CO2 in the atmosphere. This record heat is actually manmade by government employees.

President Obama declared that “the oceans will stop their rise” in his inaugural. Since that declaration, the New York “Battery” tide gauge shows that the oceans rise has indeed slowed. This is in spite of record levels of CO2. In Stockholm, Sweden, the gauge shows that the ocean is receding.

In 2018, there were no EF4 or EF5 severe tornadoes in the U.S. Nearly 100 years ago, the CO2 level was about 300 ppm compared to 400 ppm now. Looking back, there are plenty of examples of extreme weather.

The March 18, 1925, tornado outbreak had 4,000 casualties across the Midwest. In 1926, Miami, Florida was flattened by a hurricane. In 1927, a tornado destroyed St. Louis, while 100,000 had to flee flooding in the South and flooding wiped out 1,000 bridges in Vermont. In 1928, a hurricane killed 1,000 in the Florida Keys. Winds were recorded over 200 mph and blew a train off the track.

Headlines in 1934 said “the arctic is melting and the oceans will rise 40 feet due to record heat.” 1935 continued the dust bowl drought. 1936 had the most temperature extremes ever recorded, both record cold temperatures and record hot temperatures: 245 records hot records were set. The summer average for all summer stations was 89 degrees. Wisconsin, Minnesota and most of the country had record numbers of days with temperatures over 110 degrees.

This all happened when CO2 was about 300 ppm, which is well below current “safe” targets.

I am all for affordable clean solar and wind energy. However, I see no need for all of this doomsday alarm. I would like the Minnesota Senate to invite Tony Heller to testify when debating energy policy.

Kevin Moller

Fairmont