arguendo

(1) I’ve been involved in the snowmobile industry for 45 years, and I’ve seen it attacked from all angles, some that made sense and some that didn’t.

(2) I clearly remember environmentalists suggesting that snowmobiles packing the snow would make it impossible for moles, voles and mice to move around under the snow cover and they would all die. That concern was studied and quickly debunked.

(3) There have been concerns over the movement of snowmobiles disturbing wildlife like deer and wolves. Well, it was quickly determined that snowmobiles moving down a trail didn’t excite wildlife. Instead, the animals simply moved off the trails and let the snowmobiles pass. Stopping a sled, however, would concern the critters and make them take off into the woods, just like a cross–country skier or snowshoer would.

(4) Concerns over the sound levels became an issue in the early 1970s. This was a legitimate concern as the growing number of snowmobiles created an annoying din in high–use areas. The Snowmobile Safety Certification Committee (SSCC) established sound level limits and the manufacturers quickly complied.

(5) The same was true when a call was made for all off–road vehicles to reduce their exhaust emissions, the first phase of which went into effect for snowmobiles in model year 2006. The industry responded with re–engineered snowmobiles with four–stroke and clean two–stroke engines that met the new regulations.

Carbon Dioxide Factor

(6) The latest attack on motorsports is aimed at promoting the theory of man–made global warming. Since the 1970s, the theory of anthropogenic (man–caused) global warming (AGW) has gradually been accepted as fact by many academics, and their acceptance has inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to prevent warming.

(7) As former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and others have suggested, the burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide leads to global warming. In reality, the majority of carbon dioxide comes from nature. The hot springs and thermal features of Yellowstone National Park vent millions of tons of carbon dioxide every year. The same is true of locations with hot springs and other thermal features around the globe. Volcanoes can burp just once and expel enough carbon dioxide and other gases that would take humans many years to produce.

(8) Carbon dioxide is the gas we all exhale each time we breathe, and it is necessary for all plant life to create its food through photosynthesis and provide us with oxygen. When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote those new regulations for off–road vehicle manufacturers to follow, they didn’t consider carbon dioxide to be a pollutant, but political pressure to support the theory of AGW. forced the EPA to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant.

(9) What many people seem not to understand is that there are many other “greenhouse gases” that make up the air we breathe. The atmosphere consists of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and the remaining 1 percent is a mixture of argon, neon, methane, helium, krypton, hydrogen, xenon, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, iodine, carbon monoxide, ammonia, some man–made gases, water vapor and carbon dioxide. The percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to be exact, is 0.0314 percent.

(10) Water vapor in the atmosphere affects the percentage of the rest of the compounds in the air. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has fluctuated through the years; the effect of a significant increase would probably be non–threatening to the planet. Only a few of the gases in the atmosphere are greenhouse gases, including water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases.

(11) When was the last time anyone told you greenhouse gases were actually a good thing and that life on earth as we know it couldn’t exist without them? Probably never, but without those gases, the heat gained from the sun during the day would radiate back into space each evening, leaving us frozen solid like many other planets orbiting the sun. Plain and simple, we need greenhouse gases in order to survive on this planet.

The Only Constant Is (Climate) Change

(12) I remember listening to Brian Williams report on “NBC Nightly News” a couple of years ago. He noted that the Great Lakes were rapidly drying up because of global warming. Shots of Lake Superior used in the story were taken in my hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, and showed sand bars in the harbor that weren’t there a few years earlier. Well, yes, we had a few years of lower–than–average rainfall and virtually no snow in the winters. The lake level was below average but the body of water was hardly going away. Today the lake’s water level is back to normal but you’ll probably never hear Brian Williams say so.

(13) Earth is said to be about 6.4 billion years old, and you can bet that the climate has changed over those years. It always has and always will. One can’t begin to determine what the climate is going to be in the future if we make assumptions based on results gleaned from only the past 130 years that weather records have been kept. Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclical pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums that each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacial periods, each lasting about 12,000 years.

(14) Most of the long–term climate data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles, which are together known as the Milankovich cycles. The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the precession of the equinoxes, also known as the earth’s “wobble,” which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years.

(15) According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these astronomical cycles, each of which affects the amount of solar radiation that reaches earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Ages and warm interglacial periods. It is far more likely that the earth is headed for a cooling period than a warming period.

Cleaner Is Better

(16) There have been many regulations put in place that have truly improved conditions in our country. Sound level and emission limits on vehicles have resulted in cleaner air and water and provided more hospitable living conditions, not to mention engines that run better, are more powerful and more reliable. For this, clean technology should be applauded.

(17) But further government action to try to control earth’s climate will drive up energy costs, increase taxes on virtually everything corporations produce, make internal combustion engines cost–prohibitive and, therein, reduce standards of living while not doing anything to help the planet. Governments of all the nations of the world can’t control Mother Nature.

(18) The term “man–made global warming” is morphing into “climate change,” but Gore and his followers are trying to maintain or improve the revenue stream created by scare tactics of the supposed damage man has committed by burning fossil fuels. Fortunately, Mother Nature is far more powerful than man and she has a plan that is way beyond anything of which man has any control.