critical issue

Climate vs. Carbon

Rusty Alderson
6 min readDec 23, 2018
Photo by Rawfilm on Unsplash

As with so many of the issues facing mankind, this one is very complex and we would do ourselves a disservice by thinking that it can be encapsulated into a tidy little package. Hubris always gets in the way of an unbiased proposal. We humans like to think that we have all the answers, if not now, then in the near future with the aid of the right technologies and a firm commitment.

That the planet is warming is a certifiable fact, but, contrary to popular belief, it is not the result of anything that mankind has done. Mankind’s carbon emissions are not the culprit. I concede that man’s industrial activities and our vehicles with internal combustion engines might have exacerbated the problem — but only to a minor degree.

Not many people seem to know it, but the earth’s climate has been going through warming-cooling cycles for hundreds of thousands of years. This is well-documented by the evidence provided by ice-core samples from Antarctica. Distinct “rings” found in these cores represent a single year’s data.

“Ice core records allow us to generate continuous reconstructions of past climate, going back at least 800,000 years. By looking at past concentrations of greenhouse gasses in layers in ice cores, scientists can calculate how modern amounts of carbon dioxide and methane compare to those of the past, and…

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Rusty Alderson

Retired technologist — eschewing cubicles; habitual observer; perpetual student; philosopher; poet; essayist; advocate for nature and wilderness.