TO THE EDITOR:
The R.I. Catholic’s Sept. 26 editorial — “Socialism and the new green dictatorship” — drew a bunch of heated responses from letter writers in apparent concurrence with activist Greta Thunberg’s claim that the burning of fossil fuels is choking our planet’s atmosphere with heat-trapping exhaust gases (mainly carbon dioxide) resulting in global warming and climate change – and, further, that reducing these emissions will “save the Earth” by normalizing its climate. But Thunberg, her devotees (and a number of secular scientists) are ignoring Kirchhoff’s Law of Thermal Radiation and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which point out that heat naturally wants to flow, rise or spread to cooler areas. In other words, atmospheric carbon dioxide cannot hold heat, and hence is not a “greenhouse” gas.
There is only one genuine heat-holding “greenhouse” gas — water vapor — a product of thermal evaporation as well as a primary component of hot, muggy, summer days. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is determined not by human activity but by oceanic cycles.
Rather than anthropomorphic (man-made) climate change, what our world has been experiencing is a syndrome of aberrant weather being cooked up by a magnetically agitated sun which itself has entered into a state of metamorphosis with the Earth’s atmosphere being unevenly heated and excessive amounts of moisture being drawn up into it.
Environmentalism will not “save the Earth,” but an act of God can. Biblical and Marian prophecies do in fact foretell that God, employing the forces of nature which He created and answer to His will, does intend, in the not too distant future, to purify the world of every physical and spiritual contaminant.
Louis W. Barta, Cranston
