In my previous post, I asked the question: Do recent weather events and news reports have you reconsidering global warming? Rather than answering the question directly, I asked the broader question: How do we know what we think we know? So, continuing the thread of skeptical inquiry, let’s turn a critical mind toward climate science.

The Carbon Cycle [Image Source: http://eo.ucar.edu/kids/green/cycles6.htm]

The basic science behind the greenhouse effect is both long-established and non-controversial. First, we know that carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) that, in our atmosphere, create the greenhouse effect that makes life on earth possible. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “If all of these greenhouse gases were to suddenly disappear, our planet would be 60°F colder and would not support life as we know it.”

There is a natural, balanced carbon cycle in nature that maintains this beneficial greenhouse effect. However, since humans first learned to clear forests with fire and cultivate crops – but in particular since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution – humans have been upsetting the natural balance by adding GHGs to earth’s atmosphere. We began upsetting this balance in earnest when human civilizations started mining massive amounts of solar energy stored over millions of years in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas. Burning these ancient solar stores produces energy, but it also produces GHGs and a host of worse things that we wind up breathing, eating, and drinking. (I plan to address some of the controversies behind anthropogenic, or human-caused, “global warming” in my next post.)

According to the International Energy Agency, the fossil fuels oil, coal, and natural gas currently provide over 80% of the world’s energy needs. But there is a finite amount of this ancient stored solar power in the ground. In addition to adding toxins to our environment and upsetting the balance of the earth’s life-support systems, if we continue to draw down this natural capital we will one day find ourselves “bankrupt” as surely as if we were draining a bank account.

Which brings me to my Microsoft Hohm Book of the Week… Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese. Coal had its place in history. Among the fascinating historical perspectives mentioned in the BookBrowse.com summary (“It made China a twelfth-century superpower, inspired the writing of the Communist Manifesto, and helped the northern states win the American Civil War”), we discovered coal just in time to prevent a rapidly-growing human population from wiping out most of our temperate forests to satisfy our hunger for energy. However, coal’s darker side was evident as early as 1306, when England’s King Edward I tried to ban coal burning (unsuccessfully) because it led to noxious “great stinking fogs.”

Here in the present, in light of these facts about toxins, natural capital, and GHGs, powering our homes and offices with fossil fuels requires us to re-address the roles of oil, coal, and natural gas in our energy portfolio. Tools like Microsoft Hohm assist us not just by saving money, but more fundamentally by reducing our energy demands. By reducing our energy demands, we will reduce the amount of natural capital being withdrawn from our planetary bank account—and thus reduce the amount of GHGs currently overloading our planetary life-support systems.

Blog post from - Kyle G. Crider He has a B.S. degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Alabama and a Master of Public Administration degree in Urban Planning & Policy Analysis from UAB, where he’s currently in the Interdisciplinary Engineering Ph.D. program.