Writer John Stephens wants everyone to take action on global warming ("From AmCan to Greenland, take action on warming," Oct. 24) because of a global warming book he found scary.

Perhaps this subject is scary to those who read only what associate editor for Time, Michael Lemonick, has to say. I remember when Time was also responsible for the coming ice age scare. But now we have Al Gore and his trophy of a Nobel Peace Prize to make things more frightening. I guess it was expected since all Nobel Peace Prizes go to individuals promoting internationalism.

The promoters of global warming are now very carefully changing the wording to "climate change" to cover any weather condition. But currently, the big scare is all the carbon dioxide (CO2) we humans generate that raises the temperature and melts the Arctic ice causing enormous flooding.

CO2 is a normal byproduct of a lot of natural chemical reactions all over the face of the earth. All decomposition, such as the leaves you rake up for the compost pile to volcanic action, produces CO2. In Cameroon, West Africa, Lake Nyos sits inside the crater of a dormant volcano. In 1986 a landslide into the lake triggered CO2 gas to bubble up to the surface and over the rim of the mountain. Roughly 1,700 village people in the lower region died because of suffocation from the CO2. There are several thousand volcanoes on this planet, with a number under the sea, generating CO2.

Volcanoes also produce toxic gasses such as SO2 (sulfur dioxide). Volcano Nyiragongo in the Congo, not far from the border with Rwanda, produces 50,000 tons of SO2 a day, the primary cause of acid rain. That's more than the amount produced by all power plants, factories and cars in the United States.

Global warming of our troposphere comes from around 95 percent water vapor and only around 5 percent CO2. The big claim about CO2 having an effect comes from "climate models."

NASA's James Hansen, a leading climate modeling expert, was paid $720,000 by liberal fundraiser George Soros to package one such alarmist model. $720,000 buys a lot of doctored data. For example, the Arctic was warmer during the 1930s than during the late 1990s and cooled about 2 degrees Fahrenheit between 1935 to 1965, before temperatures began rising again. Almost all of Antarctica has been cooling during the last two decades and snowfall has been decreasing. Both trends are just the opposite of what climate models predict for the effects of greenhouse warming. Climate models demonstrating that humans are the cause of global warming become valuable tools for the alarmists.

What effect do the Southern California fires have on global warming? Data on large areas burned decades ago actually show a slight cooling trend because of more reflective area during the winter. It was demonstrated recently that 1939 was the hottest year this century, after which it fell considerably into that period where everyone was worried about the approaching ice age. From that point to now, temperatures have been increasing.

One reason for pulling this global warming scam is to force industry to its knees by adding another restriction on it -- this time by putting a cap on the CO2 it generates through a carbon tax. China, which doesn't have restrictions, is already dumping its products on our markets. The Register's Oct. 19 guest editorial, "We're carboholics," by NRG Energy CEO David Crane, wants a federal cap-and-trade system which in turn adheres to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consensus targets. This is all leading back to United Nations control. The IPCC was established by the very same crowd (the United Nations' UNEP) that ran the "oil for food" scam, the hoax that involved bribes and kickbacks. Now it's global warming with "money for data."

You should very definitely take action on this subject by letting your representatives know you're tired of Congress forcing our industry out of business and handing our republic over to international governmental control that will lead to the North American Union. As Lou Dobbs said, "For the first time in our history, Americans aren't dreaming of a better life for their children; they are desperately hoping that their children won't be forced into a lower standard of living and a lower quality of life."

(Snyder lives in Napa.)