University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Giegengack, chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, sees Al Gore’s presentation of global warming as An Inaccurate Truth:
He claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. Variations in planetary alignment are most likely responsible … When gravitation from other planets’ orbits causes the Earth to move closer to or further from the sun, temperatures increase or decrease. When we find that CO2 levels follow that directly, it’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2.Certain “feedback loops” naturally control the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A warmer temperature drives gases out of solution in the ocean and releases them. Microorganisms in soil become more active; they chew up leaves and emit CO2. Permafrost melts near the poles and trapped methane escapes and flows into the atmosphere … [Today, humans] are putting 6.5 billion tons of fossil-fuel carbon into the atmosphere, and only 3.5 billion is staying there, so 3 billion tons is going somewhere else. In the past, when the Earth’s climate rose, CO2 came out of the ocean, the soils, and the permafrost. Today as temperatures rise, excess CO2 is instead going into those and other reservoirs. This reversed flux is very important. Because of this, if we reduced the rate at which we put carbon into the atmosphere, it won’t reduce the concentration in the atmosphere; CO2 is just going to come back out of these reservoirs … If we were to stop manufacturing CO2 tomorrow, we wouldn’t see the effects of that for generations.
(Hat tip à mon père.)