Latest posts by James H. Rust (see all)
- A Young Person’s Guide to Energy Conservation - August 9, 2016
- Questioning “The Secret Dirty War to Stop Solar Power” - June 27, 2016
- Be Prepared For Latest UAH Satellite Global Temperature Data - April 16, 2016
For years I have thought of making a plot of global temperatures on a normal piece of graph paper starting at zero degrees at the bottom. I was too lazy. The width of the temperature line would be a little more than one degree and the graph would show very little happening.
Fortunately the originator of a website “Now You Know” has done the work and the graph follows for the years 1880 to 2006:
If the graph was continued to 2012, it would show the same flat line.
Displaying global temperatures in this manner may cause a pause for thought about the wisdom of spending hundreds of billions of dollars the past 25 years to generate data to make the graph. Global costs to attempt to modify climate by substituting renewable energy sources–wind, solar, wave action, biofuels, etc.–for fossil fuels is trillions of dollars. Annual costs are many hundreds of billions of dollars with no end in sight.
For the United States annual costs are over one hundred billion dollars and elimination of this waste could help eliminate crushing federal deficits that are leading toward financial ruin. Imagine the help for society if this energy had been directed elsewhere like fighting global poverty.
A hundred years from now, historians will look back on the late twentieth-early twenty first centuries and wonder if a universal madness had overcome the planet. The numerous environmental groups, like fleas on a dog, promoting burning fossil fuels caused catastrophic global warming will have some soul-searching explaining to do. Politicians who succumbed to the same reasoning will suffer a similar fate.