April 12, 2009
Those who cannot remember the past ...
George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But sometimes even knowing the past doesn't matter, for neither willful ignorance nor full awareness of our planet's history will effect terrestrial outcomes impervious to our infinitesimally insignificant influence.
The Earth doesn't give a damn whether humans remember the past; climate cycles continue across a timeline spanning billions of years, reacting to forces powerful beyond all human understanding and interactions incomprehensible to even those would-be intellectual titans who claim omniscience. Even Pacific Island Cargo Cults might infer that the blazing Sun in the heavens above might play a larger part in the planet's temperature than whether or not I've got the wrong kind of flat panel TV on my wall or the wrong kind of auto in my driveway.
Matt Patterson thinks it's the height of hubris to blame global warming on humans. Or the euphemism d'jour, "Climate Change."
(As an aside, I particularly like AGW, short for "Anthropogenic Global Warming." It makes me feel like a fabulously wealthy and overweight Nobel Prize-winning former vice president whenever I say it. But I digress.)
As a matter of fact, all things being equal, global warming is a good thing, no matter who -- or what -- is responsible. Actually, if we bothered to look to the planet's history, and the short portion that includes humans, we'd realize that which goes up, invariably comes down, and humanity's fortunes seem to track with the planet's temperature.
Hard to believe some silly people are deathly afraid of warming weather — worried sick because the earth has warmed a degree or two over the last 150 years.
Make no mistake — the earth has warmed. Unfortunately for the climate-change catastrophists, warming periods have occurred throughout recorded history, long before the Industrial Revolution and SUVs began spitting man-made carbon into the atmosphere. And as might be expected, these warm periods have invariably proven a blessing for humanity. Consider:
Around the 3rd century B.C., the planet emerged from a long cold spell. The warm period which followed lasted about 700 years, and since it coincided with the rise of Pax Romana, it is known as the Roman Warming.
In the 5th century A.D., the earth’s climate became cooler. Cold and drought pushed the tribes of northern Europe south against the Roman frontier. Rome was sacked, and the Dark Ages commenced. And it was a dark age, both metaphorically and literally — the sun’s light dimmed and gave little warmth; harvest seasons grew shorter and yielded less. Life expectancy and literacy plummeted. The plague appeared and decimated whole populations.
Then, inexplicably, about 900 A.D. things began to warm. This warming trend would last almost 400 years, a well documented era known as the Medieval Warm Period. Once again, as temperatures rose harvests and populations grew. Vineyards made their way into Northern Europe, including Britain. Art and science flourished in what we now know as the Renaissance.
Then around 1300 A.D. things cooled drastically. This cold spell would last almost 500 years, a severe climate event known as the Little Ice Age. Millions died in famine as glaciers advanced all over the world. The plague returned. In Greenland, the Norse colony that had been established during the Medieval Warming froze and starved. Arctic pack ice descended south, pushing Inuit peoples to the shores of Scotland. People ice skated on the Thames; they walked from Staten Island to Manhattan over a frozen New York Harbor. The year 1816 was remembered as the year without a summer, with some portions of the Northern Hemisphere seeing snowfall in June.
But around 1850 the planet began to warm up yet again. Glaciers retreated. Temperatures rose. This is the warming period which we are still enjoying today. And once again, the warmth brought bounty: The last 150 years have seen an explosion in life expectancy, population, and scientific progress like never before.
Of course, even before the appearance of humans, the earth alternated throughout its history between extremes of heat and cold: 700 million years ago the planet was covered entirely in ice; 55 million years ago, a swampy greenhouse.
Why? What drives these ancient cycles? There are a lot of theories. The waxing and waning of solar output; cosmic rays and their role in cloud formation; the earth moving through plumes of galactic dust as it travels up and down through the arm of the Milky Way; plate tectonics redirecting the ocean currents; vulcanism. Perhaps it is a combination of all of these things. Perhaps it is something as yet undiscovered.
One thing for sure that it’s not: SUVs.
Why, then, do otherwise sensible people believe that we are both causing the current warming and that the warmth is a bad thing? To me it seems some grotesque combination of narcissism and self-loathing, a mentality that says at once “I am so important that my behavior is causing this” and “I am so inherently tainted that it must be bad.”
For these self-hating humans who want us to cut our carbs (carbons, not carbohydrates), I say relax and enjoy the warmth while it lasts.
Because it won’t. No matter what we do, the ice and the cold and the dark will come again. That should be our worry.
I think the historical record trumps the hysterical broken record that is the Al Gore-helmed environmental extremist movement, but that presupposes there's a genuine interest in science, and a concern for the planet. Call me cynical, but I think the Global Baloney thing is more about achieving greater governmental control of our lives, and the concomitant reduction in our freedoms to choose how we live.
Freedom is, after all, the allergen that triggers anaphylactic shock in the smothering bosom of the nanny state, and, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in an peanut allergy-sensitive elementary school, something to be avoided at all costs.
I can't help but think that someday we'll be huddling in our woefully under-insulated homes, bemoaning the crops lost to encroaching glaciers and pitifully short growing seasons, remembering with fondness the warm days and seemingly endless summers of the early 21st century, and wondering what ever happened to that Chicken Little Gore fellow and his pathetic band of fellow hysterics, as we toss another copy of An Inconvenient Truth on the fire.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 12, 2009 09:16 PM
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Comments
If the cycle holds true, the cooling will begin about 2250. Let me know how it turns out. I will leave my phone turned on.
Posted by: The Little Coach at April 13, 2009 07:40 AM
Chicken Little Gore and his band of hysterics will be in the only temperate zone left enjoying their elitest life in a compound financed by our labor stolen via carbon offset taxes and other ploys to further return our civilization to a serf/landlord relationship.
I do like your analogy of "Freedom is, after all, the allergen that triggers anaphylactic shock in the smothering bosom of the nanny state, and, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in an peanut allergy-sensitive elementary school, something to be avoided at all costs."
I love PB and J sando's and will continue to be an irritant to the growing movement toward socialism and quack science.
Posted by: Nereus at April 13, 2009 08:29 PM