This is the second in a three-part ramble on global warming. See also Part 1.

The theory that our cars and power plants caused the global warming crisis just doesn't make sense. If burning fossil fuel does contribute to global warming, it could only be one factor among many. Even the mighty "scientific consensus" agrees with that: They always say things like, "we believe human activity is a factor in global warming." A factor. As in, one of perhaps hundreds. They usually don't even say which human activities -- could they mean the activity of breathing? I mean, I'm not even a scientist and I can think of several other causes: Increasing deforestation, increasing population, solar activity, naturally melting ice caps, and naturally changing weather patterns.

Why isn't anyone pointing to all the CO2-consuming trees we've cut down in the U.S. in the last 200 years? Maybe we're just now experiencing the consequences of that. Wikipedia shows that the U.S. was about 1/3 covered in forests through 1850. I happened to see Tom Brokaw's global warming show over the weekend, and it said that the Amazon rainforest is largely responsible for scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere today. So if the Amazon rainforest is currently 1.2 billion acres, and the total area of the United States is 2.3 billion acres, and we cut down 1/3 of that area in trees, then we've lost about 40% of CO2-absorbing tree power since 1850. That seems pretty significant and relevant to me.

And here's another point, which I still can't find much discussion of: In 1850, there were about 23 million people in America exhaling CO2. In 2000, there were about 280 million people -- a tenfold increase -- doing the same. Presumably, similar population increases have occurred around the world. (I read somewhere that the world population was about 1 billion in 1800, and now it's some 6 billion or so.) I haven't found one, but I suspect that if one were to graph the world population, it would probably look similar to the graph showing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Combined with the deforestation, that sounds like a major change to the ecosystem.

Those are just two things that scream out to me for an explanation as to why they aren't causes of global warming. I'll continue in Part 3 tomorrow.