Photo credit to Jovinsson's photostream, Flikr

An email making the rounds:

For all of you out there across the globe who have fought so hard to tackle the hideous enemy of our planet, namely carbon emissions, that bogus god you worship named "Climate Change" or "Global Warming", there is some really bad news that will be very painful for you to process.

The current volcanic eruption going on in Iceland, since it first started spewing volcanic ash, has, to this point, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet. Not only that, this single act of God has added emissions to the earth estimated to be 42 times more than can be corrected by the extreme human regulations proposed for annual reductions.

It's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up til midnight to finish your kid's "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your Landcruiser and speedboat, going on vacation to a city park instead of overseas, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your $1 light bulbs with $10 light bulbs ...well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just the past week. The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in the past weeks has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast carbon. And, those thousands of jobs you helped move to Asia with expensive emissions demands on businesses...you know, the ones that are creating even more emissions than when they were creating our jobs, well that must seem really worthwhile now. And I do wish that there was some kind of silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western U.S.A. will start in about 2 months and those fires will negate your efforts to reduce carbon emissions in our world for the next 2 years.

So, grab a beer, give the world a hug, and have nice day!

(Authors note: First of all, I know that the debate on global warming has sometime ago reached the point of religious fervor, but please read this whole post through before passing judgment. You might just find yourself agreeing. Thanks.)

As the summit at Copenhagen suggests, it appears that the push to stop AGW (anthropomorphic global warming) is at a stalemate. The reason? Many have found that the science behind the theory is at the very least politically corrupt and therefore suspect.

At the heart of it, Al Gore's famous hockey stick graph, based as it is on ice core samples, has been proven to be a fraud. Rather than temperatures following CO2, it is the other way around. Whether or whether not Mr. Gore has admitted his mistake, as has been reported, the British Supreme court has ruled against his "evidence," as has the hacked email disclosures from the University of East Anglia. To add further to the suspicion and political collusion, the creators of the graph have purposefully omitted a sharp and pronounced medieval warming trend when, obviously, there was no AGW.

Besides the above, it's incredulous to think, based on known estimates, that man is the total cause. The majority of greenhouse gases are naturally occurring water evaporation, with CO2 accounting for some 3%. Of that 3%, humans are responsible for 0.3%.

In a recent article titled, "Did a Deep Biosphere Precede Life on Earth's Surface," Cornell University Professor Emeritus Thomas Gold, who for 20 years directed the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, proposes the striking and controversial theory that "a full functioning ecosystem feeding on hydrocarbons, exists deep within the earth, and that a primordial source of hydrocarbons lies even deeper." Gold believes that the microbes predate all of the planet's other life forms, existing even before photosynthesis became the preferred life-giving form.

Gold, a world-renowned physicist  and author of The Deep Hot : The Myth of Fossil Fuels, believes that oil and natural gas hydrocarbons are not biological in origin and are found not only in the shallow crust of the earth but also at greater depths. He maintains that hydrocarbons, especially methane, were an important constituent of the earth when it was formed and are widely distributed in depth. These deep hydrocarbon deposits continuously replenish the shallower deposits.

If Gold's controversial theory is true, then even the term "fossil fuels" would have to be dropped. Gold contends that petroleum is primordial and currently supports biological activity in the Earth and is not the converted remains of ancient life after a few million years of decomposition. In addition, these theories explain the presence of composition of mineral enriched earth and a few other mysteries such as the presence of helium which has been so far unexplained by conventional ideas.

As Gold points out, so far no one has ever been able to come up with the chemical reactions needed to form petroleum from decaying organic matter.

It's heartening to see that some scientists are still using science, rather than politics to figure things out.

But the point of this post isn't to disprove AGW. That, in my opinion is a fools errand that will never be resolved either way.

I believe the idea of man-made global warming is a dangerous diversion. It puts the focus on a debatable and unproven scientific theory and takes the focus off much more serious problems created by the burning of fossil fuels, such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide emissions, which contribute to smog and acid rain and the formation of fine particulate matter. Not to mention, mercury emissions, sulfuric, carbonic, and nitric acids. As well as radioactive materials, such as uranium and thorium.

This highly dangerous stuff is a threat to all life on earth. And that point isn't debatable.

Besides that, who in their right mind wants to willingly pour more billions of dollars into the quagmire known as the middle east? Who wants to see another massive oil spill? Who wants to breath the air of Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, or LA, for that matter?

Even vitally important events such as the imminent destruction of the earth's fisheries are eclipsed by the theory of man-made global warming.

This is not left or right. It's not political. It's common sense. Unless we come to agreement on what the actual truth is, what the priorities are and do what is necessary to stop these ills, the manufactured political stalemate known as global warming may just prove to be exactly what it's billed out to be: the destruction of us all. And that, more so than anything, is an inconvenient truth.