Guest Essayist: Harry T. Spence, Norwood, Massachusetts

When you watch the weatherman on TV, you notice he is very upbeat, gregarious as well as garrulous. He has a huge map of that section of the U.S. where his program emanates. On the map he shows you the results of the Doppler radar which always indicates the direction of the weather, usually west to east or south to north. He tells you what is going to happen tomorrow based on where the weather is and its directions.

In the early years of aviation, when the mail was carried by that means, the pilot would phone a person located where his first leg was to go, and while his plane was being gassed and checked over, the would find out what the weather was like. If it were bad, he would look at his alternative path and call another source. Pretty primitive, but not that too far removed from today's weather reports.

Yet, it is the ilk of the weathermen who have alarmed us to "Global Warming!" They use a super computer to compute all the variables involved in long-range weather predictions. To do this, they have created program models into which they input data they want massaged. Voila! Ten hours later they have results: "Global Warming!"

When I was in the computer business, I used to hear the acronym: GiGo, which stood for: Garbage in; Garbage out. In other words, the computer could only produce what you asked for based on what you told it. If your data were wrong, your results were very questionable.

I believe the "Global Warming!" crowd have been deluded by the fact that their input was not sound. Now, I am not a climatologist, but I have read widely on the subject and have concluded that there are many esteemed scientists who credit "Global Warming!" as those who do not. The planet Earth is HUGE! It has circumference of 25,000 miles at the Equator! It makes one rotation in twenty-four hours which means it spins at a rate of 1,042 miles per hour. Can you feel the movement? It is truly amazing! We are spinning at a high rate of speed and we feel nothing!

But ... We are also hurling through space in our orbit around the sun, which takes 365 days to complete. How fast is that in miles per hour? Let's see. The sun is 93 million miles away and is sort of in the center of a circular orbit (it's actually somewhat oval) so to get the speed, we have to do some computations.

First, one would have to double the distance of Earth to Sun, since Earth would be on the outside of the circle. To get the circumference of the orbit, one would have to multiply that number by Pi. So, let's see - 93 times two is 186 million miles; times Pi (3.14) and that is 584,040,000 miles divided by 365. That comes to 1,600,109. Divide that by 24 and you get 66,671 miles per hour!

If one were to combine this revolution and rotation speed, we are hurtling through space at a combined speed of 67,713 miles per hour! Again, we feel nothing! The reason for this probably has a lot to do with the mass of the Earth. It is so huge and man is so tiny, respectively, that the shock of the speed is communicated directly to the mass and the six billion ants (us) don't feel it.

Yet, we are told to believe that a gas, CO2, collects on this mass and is heating it up, so significantly, that it is causing the entire Earth to heat up or in other words, this phenomenon causes "Global Warming!" Further, that man's use of CO2 generating products is responsible for this.

Now, the year 2008 [winter], was the coldest in twenty or thirty years. When asked about this phenomenon, the "Global Warming!" alarmists state that this proves their point: the frigid weather is an offshoot of "Global Warming!"

Purportedly, Mr. Al Gore was late for a talk on the subject by a series of snow, ice and cold delays and when he finally got to this shtick he excused his lateness with, you guessed it, "Global Warming!" made me do it!

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It was good to read Harry Spence's essay on our HUGE PLANET. Not only do we not feel the spinning of the earth, nor does the zillion tons of concrete poured regularly for buildings not make this spinning ball of dirt lopsided; and like the battery rabbit it just keeps spinning around. (Of course we know all man has done in making concrete is re-arranging the material and moving it a small distance to another place on this huge planet!) If you have ever been in an airplane you found out immediately Harry's concept of "not feeling motion" because once the airplane leaves the ground it creates an odd feeling like you are suspended on a string or something. There is nothing to compare movement to--when you're UP in the sky you don't get to see telephone poles flash by or see mile markers on the freeway! Thanks Harry, for this information about "Global Warming!" Yeah, we here in Ohio will be interested to see how the summer coming up will compare to the winter of 2008! THE WORDWRIGHT.