Re: Cap and trade: hold your breath, by Michelle Stirling-Anosh, Advocate, May 11:
Why in the world would your newspaper put such an article highlighted with a cartoon that is entirely based on ignorance and lack of information?
The article itself shows that most people are ignorant of scientific facts on the warming effect of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide being one of those gases.
When there is ignorance or lack of information, it is very easy to generate fear and funnel fear towards the worship and be controlled by something. In ancient times it was fear of the gods, in modern times we replaced gods with economy.
It is so preposterous to create fear that carbon dioxide caps equate to gross unemployment. When we overwhelm natural processes, we suffer or some people suffer anyway, in some other ways especially on health issues.
The article implies that all carbon dioxide emitted just remains around us and the atmosphere. To talk about carbon dioxide emissions in the absence of photosynthesis is wrong; photosynthesis — when plants take up carbon dioxide and water and release oxygen (with sunlight) for animals and human to breath.
Subsequently, we breath in oxygen, we exhale carbon dioxide. The trick is how much of this carbon dioxide can be stored by plants when we destroy vast areas of them (e.g. forests and peatlands); this net storage is very important because plants also emit carbon dioxide at night. Thus, the management of carbon dioxide cannot be separated from the management of our ecosystems.
Unfortunately, we have the tendency to assume that engineering and technology will handle it and we are beginning to see that deep injection of carbon dioxide is far from being a perfect solution.
People should be cautious about pseudo-scientific websites as source of information; there are websites created mainly for misinformation.
Global warming is not just physics; it spans the whole gamut of physical, chemical, biological sciences. When we lack a background of even the most basic scientific principle, ethically, we should not mislead people base on half-truths.
Marilou Montemayor
Red Deer