The amazing times that we live in

A letter last week claimed: “Everybody knows that …”

‘global warming comes from our furnaces’. This raised my curiosity about heat from fossil fuel consumption to the Earth’s atmosphere’s temperature. My thought: “All the fuels burned probably aren’t even close to the energy from the sun that is powering the Earth’s weather.”

Mere minutes of Google search obtained plenty of scientific and economic information with regards to both the total worldwide hydrocarbon consumption and the Net Energy Earth receives from the sun. Basic calculations — that you yourself could do — showed that the latter greatly outweighs the former by many orders of magnitude.

In one source, a physicist and energy industry analyst put it, “the Earth receives more energy from the sun in one hour than all of the energy consumed by man from fossil fuels on Earth in a year.”

In short, things that the writer “knows”, are “obvious (when he) thinks about it” and “everybody (him, he means) knows that now” are pretty much horsehockey. Pay no attention to them.

So, no, global warming isn’t coming directly from us heating our homes; that’s insignificant. Likely, as scientists believe, the warming of the earth’s climate we are now seeing is coming from the increased amount of heat trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere that results from its increased CO2 content.

Perhaps the letter writer doesn’t understand science? Or possibly, he wishes to throw up flack to distract people from seeing his party has no plan to address this problem.

— David Fundakowski, Chico