Download - Wheat Life

WGC REPORTS WL
Not so fast
Man’s CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT quESTIONED
It’s not that wheat farmers are skeptical of global warming and the potential for
climate change, it’s that many of them believe man’s impact on the environment is
puny compared to the planet’s self-regulating mechanisms. Art Douglas couldn’t
agree more.
Professor emeritus at Creighton University in Nebraska where he taught for 25 years,
Douglas now lives in Arizona where he continues to consult. Although most mainstream
scientists agree climate change caused by humankind’s CO2 contribution to the
atmosphere is occurring, Douglas begs to differ. Not only that, he questions whether
rising CO2 levels are necessarily a bad thing, especially when viewed against a historical
record of ice cores that reveal levels 15 to 20 times higher during various prehistoric
periods.
“Don’t let anyone tell you CO2 is a bad for you and is going to kill us. It’s always been
much higher than it is now,” he said, adding the earth has also tended to be warmer
than it is now.
Douglas calls on the work of Milutin Milankovic, a Serbian geophysicist and
civil engineer who lived from 1879 to 1958, to back up his contention that man has
very little to do with the changing climate. While interned in Hungary during the First
World War, Milankovic worked out a theory on the occurrence of ice ages based on periodic changes in earth’s orbit in
relation to the sun and the tilt of its axis.
In a nutshell, the change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the placement of the earth in an elliptical orbit which sometimes
takes it further from the sun creates a 100,000-year climate cycle. Although Milankovic’s work was just a theory
during his lifetime, deep sea core samples have proven a cycle of rapid warm ups of the planet followed by a slow cooling
down with a corresponding rise and fall in CO2.
Showing a graph of the rhythm of warming and cooling over 400,000 years, Douglas asked, “Where are we now A
rapid rise in temperature. Humans who are so worried about what we are doing with CO2 have got to realize we are
in a Milankovic cycle that is at the peak of
Sun spot numbers and
global sea surface temperatures
warming.”
Another aspect of climate change unrelated
to Milankovic’s work looks at sunspots.
Douglas said there is a relationship
between sunspots and the temperature of
the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
“What is controlling our climate The
Atlantic and the Pacific. What is causing the
oceans to warm up and cool off Sunspots.
We are seeing a natural phenomenon.
There’s a lot more to the story than what
is being told to you,” he said. “Should we
be worried about CO2 in the atmosphere
No, because it is not going to be there much
longer.”
WASHINGTON GRAIN COMMISSION
Slide taken from Art Douglas’ presentation at the 2011 Tri-State Wheat Convention
WHEAT LIFE JANUARY 2012 49