A lesson to learn from something else to worry about

Katrina has increased the Global Warming and carbon emission controversy. I have made it clear that while I believe in Global Warming I'm not certain about the impact of burning fossil fuels. Last November I wrote.

Global warming is here and it's too late to stop it if indeed we ever could. Kyoto is important, there are a number of good reasons to reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Pollution and leaving our grandchildren some oil to make plastic out of are just two. We have already burnt half of the worlds oil reserves, the genie is out of the bottle and it's going to warm up, the storms are going to become more violent, there are going to be increasing droughts in some areas and heavy rain in others. The sea level is going to continue to rise perhaps as much as 100 feet.
We need to stop spending all of our energy looking for someone to blame and start looking at how we are going to adapt to the inevitable. It's time for a new Kyoto treaty where nations agree to work together to adapt to what could be rapidly changing conditions. Ninety percent of the worlds population live in areas that could be submerged by the year 2100. Changing weather patterns combined with the increased price of oil will impact how we feed the world. The threat of the inevitable climate change is the greatest civilized man has ever faced. Up to this point the worlds politicians have simply enabled denial. The longer we wait the greater the possibility that we will not survive.

Many scientist claim that burning fossil fuels is responsible for Global Warming. Well it turns out Global Warming is not the only natural change we have to worry about and there is a lesson to be learned from that. As you might recall in the 70's and 80's we were told about the disappearing ozone layer. We were told by scientists this was the result of chlorofluorocarbons, (CFCs) used in cooling and for cleaning escaping into the atmosphere. CFC's were banned at great expense. We now realize the real reason may be a natural variation in the earths magnetic field. The details of magnetic field variation can be found at Magnetic Storm on the NOVA/PBS website but I'll give a brief summary here.

On the average of every 250,000 years the earths magnetic pole reverses. The period of reversal can last several hundred years and during that period the magnetic field weakens.

But the warning signs of a declining field are subtler—though they are evident in every clay dish that was ever fired. During high-temperature baking, iron minerals in clay record the exact state of Earth's magnetic field at that precise moment. By examining pots from prehistory to modern times, geologist John Shaw of the University of Liverpool in England has discovered just how dramatically the field has changed. "When we plot the results from the ceramics," he notes, "we see a rapid fall as we come toward the present day. The rate of change is higher over the last 300 years than it has been for any time in the past 5,000 years. It's going from a strong field down to a weak field, and it's doing so very quickly."

The magnetic field does a couple of important things beside point a compass needle north. First, it prevents the cosmic wind from the sun from literally blowing the earth's atmosphere off. It is thought that is was happened on Mars about 4 million years ago when it's magnetic field died. Don't let this keep you awake at night as the field will not be weak long enough to allow this to happen on earth. Second, the magnetic field is responsible for the ozone layer which protects the earth's surface from dangerous ultra-violet radiation. This is happening now as the ozone layer thins. The fossil record shows a correlation between large scale species extinction and magnetic pole reversals. This should be a concern.

We now know that the ozone layer is going to thin in spite of the fact we have eliminated CFC's. We have to adapt to it. Global warming is going to continue even if we reduce carbon emissions. We have to adapt to it.