GLOBAL WARMING -- BENEFICIAL? 

Back in the 1930s when there were only two billion people on planet earth, the "population bomb" theory said we would all smother when the total reached four billion. We are still here. In the 1960s, worry about nuclear conflagration was fashionable. Nothing happened. The 1970s brought fear of a fuel shortage and freezing in our condos. Another false alarm. In the late 1980s and now during the first days of another decade, a new, and profitable, growth industry is proclaiming that we'll all melt on a rapidly warming planet. Humbug. The global warming trend is beneficial and should be encouraged. It seems to be a necessity for some humans to spend time worrying rather than engaging in worthwhile and practical endeavours. But those who exploit such human failings know how to manipulate alleged facts and hide others. My recent seminars have been suggesting that the alleged global warming trend has not been sufficiently and scientifically proven, and even if true it may bring more benefits than disasters to many parts of the globe. When most of the world is fearing the greenhouse effect, it is hard to find someone to agree with me. I always find that helpful and it makes me realize I am on the right track. Someone else does follow the same line of thinking... the same person who 20 years ago first came up with the initial observation that the planet appears to be warming. For five years he was considered not worth considering. Not one North American or European scientist agreed with him. He was ostracized by the foreign scientific community and became a minority of one. Eventually others started noticing results in their own calculations that supported his earlier observation. Why the delay? Because there is as much superstition in the scientific community as there is fact. At that time, it wasn't scientifically acceptable to agree with scientific observations from the U.S.S.R. The gentleman who started this thinking is leading Soviet climatologist Mikhail Bodeyko. He believes we are undergoing a normal cycle, along a gargantuan time line unobservable to man and hence almost incomprehensible. He believes we are entering a global phase, similar to one 6,000 years ago during the "Pleistocene Epoch", a time when the earth experienced what climatologists termed "climatic optimum", a time of the best climatic conditions. Bodeyko says the global warming trend is beneficial and should be encouraged. Such concepts follow this line of thinking: If the temperature of the planet does increase there will be more evaporation from the surface of the world's oceans (71 percent of the earth's cover), hence more water in the rainfall cycle. The higher temperatures will result in more violent monsoons, hurricanes and typhoons. This is not all bad. Increased velocity will carry these storms further inland instead of losing force when encountering land masses, the usual pattern during recent memory. Moisture levels to continental inland growing areas will increase enabling more of the planet's surface to provide moisture for evaporation, increasing still further the amount of water in the rainfall cycle. As oceans warm, the volume of existing water will swell by thermal expansion alone. Some islands and atolls will be covered (See the Maldives now, they may be the first country to disappear!). Some Antarctic and Arctic pack ice will melt adding to the increase in ocean water levels (up to between 25 and 140 centimetres) according to the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland). However, it is unlikely that the mile-deep Antarctic ice cover (containing a reported 90 percent of the world's fresh water) will melt to any substantial degree. It is just too cold and most of it is too high up to be affected by small increases in sea level temperatures. Having flown over the Greenland ice cap (which holds five percent of the world's fresh water supply) I can tell you that it isn't going to melt much either, except at the sea level ice rim. More icebergs will be created as sea level glacial calving speeds up. It's a lot colder a few thousand metres up and in those latitudes, at those altitudes, it is always below freezing. Increased precipitation in the form of snowfall eventually gets stored in either the Antarctic or Arctic ice lockers. More rain, more snow, and more ice stored at the poles eventually lowers the sea level -- and the cycle starts over again. Bodeyko says the increased rainfall will regreen much of the world's deserts -- which are 44 times larger than the Amazon rain forest! This will enable food production to increase in many presently hard-pressed areas in developing countries. He further states that it will rain in the Sahara, in the 1990s! Key factors for plant growth include heat, moisture and carbon dioxide. If the planet is heating up, these three components will be created in quantities greater than during most of man's recorded history. This does not mean total disaster: just change. A new report has just been scanned into my computer from the Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences' Biosphere Council, Alexander Yanshin. He too views the greenhouse effect more optimistically than many following their scientific (?) herd instincts. Yanshin points out that "we now know from (their) drilling experiments that the Antarctic shield was formed 35 million years ago and has lived through several periods of warming, much more substantial than that expected to be induced by the greenhouse effect". He says that satellite photos show dry river beds, lost in the sands of the Sahara 4,000 to 35,000 years ago, during the last warm period between ice ages, when it rained regularly in the Sahara and there were full rivers and a rich flora and fauna. Further, he says "What we know today suggests the conclusion that, contrary to widespread belief, the greenhouse effect will bring our planet no harm". In the communications age, sift information carefully. There is just as much misinformation "out there" as information. Training from the past can lead you astray.

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