Global warming doesn’t matter because there is so little we can do about it. First of all, the most zealous advocates of greening the planet do not control the governments of all the planet and have little or no hope of convincing nations such as China and India to redirect their energies to reduce carbon emissions.
If China, for example, refuses to give up coal as its main energy source toward greater industrialization, it makes little difference what restrictions the United States places upon itself in the use of fossil fuel, except that the United States will handicap itself in world competition with other nations.
But all of those considerations mean little when one looks at the conclusions of the most learned astronomers among us who have found some dire outlook on our world and the universe in which our world exists.
On Tuesday, Oct. 4, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering, not theorizing, but discovering that the universe is being blown apart by a mysterious force that cosmologists now call dark energy, a finding that has thrown the fate of the universe and indeed the nature of physics into doubt.
These astronomers are Saul Pearlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley; Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra; and Adam G. Reiss of the Space Telescope Science Institute and John Hopkins University, Baltimore.
The three men led two competing teams in the study of this expansion of the universe, which they found in 1998 was speeding up. Subsequent cosmological measurements have confirmed that roughly 70 percent of the universe by mass or energy consists of this antigravitational dark energy that is pushing the galaxies apart.
So there is a lot going on in the space that surrounds our relatively small planet earth. Who are we as a civilization or just one of numerous nations and societies that inhabit the earth to believe that through modification of our behavior we can effect change in our climate? Incredible hubris it seems to me.
The three astronomers will be presented with their prizes – 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million U.S.) in Stockholm, Dec. 10.