May 28, 2014

Chicken Little Redux

The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little was published in 1840. In the book the character Chicken Little kept warning everyone that the “sky was falling” which indicated the world was coming to an end.

Today we are being told again that the world is coming to an end but this time it is due to “climate change” raising the oceans.

In reality, the hysteria is less about “climate” and more about “change”. That is “change” in the wealth of insider-capitalists. Consider the millions of taxpayer dollars paid to Democratic insiders for Obamacare websites that do not work. The same thing is going to happen with Obama’s one billion dollar Climate Resilience Fund, insider-capitalists will get richer at everyone else’s expense.

Here is the reality of climate change-caused ocean rising.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are over 333 million cubic miles of water on our planet with 321 million cubic miles (96%) of that in the oceans. That means the average depth of oceans is about 2.31 miles covering an area of 139 million square miles.

The Arctic ice mass varies by season from about 3 to 7 thousand cubic miles of ice and is decreasing about 3% per decade.

However, the Antarctic ice mass is about 6.36 million cubic miles of ice, making it about 1,000 times larger than the Arctic ice mass, and is increasing about 1% per decade. This growth has been attributed to a warming climate in the southern hemisphere which transports more moisture to Antarctica, causing the interior ice sheets to grow while some of the peripheral ice mass melts.

So if the total amount of ice on the planet is increasing, the ocean must be rising from another cause.

If global warming exists it could cause the ocean water to warm which expands the water thus raising the level. Establishing the average temperature of 321 cubic miles of water with vastly differing depths and salinity is a formidable challenge. Doing so for the past 100 years is conjecture, not science.

However, we are being told that the average global temperature increased 1°F from 1901 to 2012 causing the oceans to rise 8 inches. Based on estimated thermal expansion coefficients of sea water, that would require that the entire mass of the ocean increased in temperature 1°F, which defies all thermodynamic principles.

So all this media-induced angst about increasing ocean levels is really about something else, like increasing the wealth of insider-capitalists. That is not to say we should not control our pollutants. Doing so is simply being good stewards of the lands we occupy. However, on the list of countries by pollution levels, we are ranked 84th and account for 17% of the CO2 emissions globally whereas China is ranked 16th and accounts for 26%.

The simple fact is, we cannot control what other countries do. Only a fool would believe we can get their leaders to control pollution levels at the cost of their personal financial well being. So how about we worry about things we can do something about, like replacing politicians who spend our money on worthless projects that enrich their owners!

Rex A. Hoover
Sumerduck

IN LOVING MEMORY OF REX ALLAN HOOVER (1942 - 2017)