Clyde Burnett, Peak to Peak.   Our television videos and news have recently presented almost as many stories of extreme weather as political scandals. Flash floods, wildfires, and tornadoes have disrupted family homes and risked lives of fire, police, and volunteers in rescue work, but climate change and global warming are never mentioned. It’s time to remind you of the scientific cause and solutions.

Planet Earth has a stable unique habitat for humans by virtue of its radiation energy balance. We have demonstrated that the atmospheric greenhouse effect is responsible for the huge 33oC heat trapping of Earth’s infrared radiation. This is based on the scientific facts of the Kelvin temperature dependence of heat radiation that demonstrates the infrared maximum of Earth’s radiation, and the resonant absorption of this infrared by the vibration - rotation energy structure along with electronic structure of certain trace molecules like water, carbon dioxide and methane. Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules fortunately fail the electronic capability. Water vapor is the major greenhouse gas, by virtue of the thermal evaporation from the 70% ocean surface source of Earth. It also has a feedback capability; the warm ocean surface yields water vapor, which yields additional trapping to add more evaporation. The earth’s atmospheric structure has the cool temperature suitable for precipitation, yielding a 10-day cycle of evaporation-precipitation. A failure of this cycle would lead to a runaway greenhouse effect of water vapor trapping.

Finally, the other trace molecules have concentrations largely independent of temperature, which controls the water vapor trapping by virtue of a slight additional independent warming of the huge ocean source.

The increased population of humans enables us to control the total heat trapping by virtue of our technical control of the concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and others. We now have a huge responsibility to control the total Earth infrared heat trapping for the habitat of ourselves and all life on Earth!

Our technical capabilities have unfortunately outpaced our science studies so that we have increased the CO2 concentrations above the stable value by about 43% by burning fossil fuels to produce power. I am a member of the relatively small scientific community that understands this danger; the wealthy fossil fuel community continues the propaganda of continuation of power generation in spite of the science. So, the CO2 concentrations have increased to 410 ppm, the global temperature has increased to the total 1oC above normal, and the Arctic sea ice will soon disappear, and our weather systems will be more sluggish and difficult to predict.

A one-hour program “How to Save the World,” available on Link TV, has reviewed some of the solutions. This program looks at Costa Rica; the country has no fossil fuel. They conserve resources by electing to have no Army. They developed renewable energy from geothermal and hydropower and are almost 100% renewable.

Dr. Rebecca Cole, part-time resident of Eldora, has just been appointed Director of Costa Rica Operations for the Organization for Tropical Studies.

China and India have huge populations and have copied the fossil fuel programs of the U.S. Now with bad pollution and the need to limit CO2, the governments have moved to renewable; China is now world leader in solar technology. The U.S. election of Trump and a Republican congress has resulted in a retreat from any effort to control emissions. This is due in part to failure of the electorate’s science education. Failure to correct this will cost in world leadership and the environmental protection of our habitat.