Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how hysterical the human race is. Recently, as you may have noticed, we’re been informed that we’re a terrible cancer on the face of the Earth, and now we’re about to destroy everything, including polar bears, with our nasty emissions.
Not exactly a break with tradition, though; Malthus called us all diseased, over-breeding pigs back in the 1700s, about the time that Defoe was writing scathing satires on the rich eating children. In the 1800s, Bentham, Cadbury and the other nouveau riche of Britain’s industrial age were trying to assist the downtrodden (a laudable effort, if not purely motivated by the humanitarian urge they are often ascribed to), and of course in the 1900s, we had a wide variety of “people are sick” events to choose from, starting with the Great War and more or less getting worse from there on in.
As usual, such assertions are couched in terms that we find a little more palatable; in this case, it’s the brutal industrial overlords of Big Oil, Big Industry and various other entities (including – gasp- Communist China!) who are forcing all of us little, honest, lovely, smiling, happy and otherwise deeply responsible people to pollute and despoil our world. Basically, it’s the same story – as individuals, we’re not really responsible for it, so we can feel good about ourselves. The real enemy are those mustache-twirling technocrats in the opera-hats over there who have planned all along to turn the world into a huge trash-heap for reasons that no-one can adequately explain.
And, of course, now they have evidence on their side. No, really.
Well, I must tell you right off; I’m a geologist, not a climatologist. On the one hand, that might seem to disqualify me from commenting, but on the other hand, it does provide me with something that a lot of climatologists seem to lack. Context.
In science, context is everything. For example, when the first atom bomb tests were conducted on Bikini Atoll, many respected scientists averred learnedly that the very air would be set alight, destroying all life on Earth. I’m not sure if you noticed or not, but that didn’t happen. Now, of course, we know that as hot as an A-bomb explosion gets, it’s nowhere near as hot as, say, a ten-mile chunk of rock hitting the planet at 50,000 mph tends to get, and the firestorm that happened then certainly didn’t sterilize the whole planet. OK, it was 65 million years ago, but well, we’re here, so something survived.
See? Context.
So, what does context tell us about global warming? Well, let’s first set aside the discussion about whether it’s happening or not for another day. (Believe me, that’s a juicy one!) Let us, for sake of argument, assume that the IPCC worst-case projection is accurate, and we’ll rise by 7 degrees or so in the next century. Do we see death and destruction? Well, not quite.
See, at the end of the last major glacial period (a lot of people say “the end of the last Ice Age”, but folks, it ain’t ended yet) global temperatures rose. A lot. And, a fair body of evidence now suggests, very very fast. Some areas appear to have experiences rises of 15F in less than four decades. We were around for that one, and we didn’t even bottleneck; as a population, we exploded, responding to the new environment with a vigor and gusto that the climate-change-doomsayers seem to forget that we possess. No, I’m not saying that it will be easy, but it won’t be calamitous.
There were extinctions; many mega-faunas went out, mammoths were restricted to extreme northern Siberia and northern Canada until our ancestors and a change in vegetation seems to have finally done for them. Polar bears, once widespread, began to find their ranges limited as the ice caps retreated to the highest latitudes.. hey, that sounds familiar! But the rate of extinction does not seem to be much lower then than it is today, despite the opinions of the environmentalists who tell us everything on the planet is dying. As a geologist, I can tell you that, uh, that’s what they do. Evolution is a long term process, and things die constantly.
Of course, before the last glaciation event, global temperatures fluctuated too. They rose, initially, for about 20-30 years, and in that time, put on anywhere from 5 to 10 F – pretty impressive rises – before the bottom dropped out and the world froze. Again, mass extinctions weren’t on the cards then, either, just the same slow die-off.
The Earth has been much hotter than it is today, and much much colder. Triassic temperatures averaged in the 80F range globally, Precambrian “snowball Earth” temps down below 20F. The fact is there is no baseline “normal” from which to measure our temperatures; even 1000 years ago, the Vikings found a paradise in the far north, and grew crops there. They called it Greenland. It’s still there today, but scientists and alarmists now point to its horrifying rate of glacial retreat. They don’t point to the retreating glaciers revealing Viking settlements with grain stores and farms, because it doesn’t fit the story.
Something else that doesn’t fit the story is Antarctica, which is getting colder and icier by the year, so much so that over a dozen species of Antarctic lichen have gone extinct, or are threatened with extinction.
Where’s their TV ad?
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