Global warming is just a myth

Rosie Bliss of Lake Zurich wrote in the Herald June 9, 2008 that she wanted political candidates to pay more attention to global warming She stated that there "is no denying that global warming is happening".

Sorry to burst your bubble, Rosie, but it's not getting warmer. Temperatures peaked in 1998 and they have been below that level ever since. A decade of cooling is not global warming despite what Al Gore says.

It is indeed ironic that the same day this letter was published the Herald ran a story on how local cities were being forced to spend more money on road salt because this last winter was one of the worst on record. And according to Accuweather, the first five months of this year the Chicago area has averaged 1.75 degrees BELOW the 100-year average. Last year China had the coldest winter in at least 50 years. On April 23, Science Daily reported the Antarctic sea was getting colder and the sea ice extent around Antarctica was the largest ever recorded. The University of Alaska reported that there was so much ice in the Bering Sea in March that crab fisherman had to delay the start of the season by a month.

Keep in mind these lower temperatures come despite more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants being built in the last ten years mostly in China and India. And more than 100 million more fossil fuel-powered vehicles on the road today than a decade ago. All that CO2 going into the atmosphere and still it's cooler. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to question the hypothesis that CO2 causes global warming.

A Leibniz Institute article in Nature magazine predicts cooling for at least the next decade. Professor Don Easterbrook predicts cooling for 2 or 3 more decades. Both of these are based upon changes in ocean circulation, which makes sense since the oceans contain 1 million times more heat than the atmosphere does. And CO2 is only 0.003% of the atmosphere.

There is nothing "greener" than CO2. It is a proven scientific fact that CO2 acts as a fertilizer and enhances all biomass growth. Nurseries pump large amounts of CO2 into their greenhouses, typically to about twice what is in the atmosphere, to enhance the growth of high-margin plants. They do this because CO2 improves the growth rate and size and decreases water use. Experts estimate green plant growth has increased by at least 15 percent since the industrial revolution started putting CO2 into the atmosphere and since we are going to have 9 billion people to feed by 2050 lets use the most nontoxic, cleanest and cheapest fertilizer in the world, CO2, to increase the growth rate and viability of food crops worldwide. This will help the world's poor more than any foreign policy giveaway we could devise.

It's not getting warmer, it's getting cooler. What are our representatives going to do about that?

Bill Zettler

Mundelein