Kowabunga

With the impending publication of a new U.N. report that puts the blame for Global Warming on mankind, along with Al Gore being nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work on Global Warming, there has been a great deal written on the subject.

The Liberal-Left, which controls much of the media and other sources of information and research, have been pushing climate change as being a man-made phenomenon, rather than a natural planetary cycle. They even use hostile rhetoric towards those who take positions contrary to their "it's all man's fault" attitude.

Climate change is natural and ongoing. It was only about forty years ago that there was a huge clamor that the Earth was entering another ice age. Now the sky is falling, and they are concerned about the current warming trend, without looking at all of the facts, not to mention all the variables that impact the Earth's climate.

They use images of polar bears stranded on ice floes, some of which have drowned as they drifted to far from shore. Sad as this is, one must remember that polar bears survived the last warming period that occurred at the time when the Vikings explored much of the Northern Atlantic when the Earth's average surface temperature was much higher than it is today. At that point in time, and up until about the 14th century, it was possible to grow crops in Greenland. At this same time, there is evidence that citrus was grown in Mongolia. Currently, Mongolia is unable to support the farming of citrus fruit. The end of the Viking Age and agriculture in Greenland coincides with the beginning of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that lasted for several hundred years, and gave way to the current warming trend that the Earth is now experiencing.

The computer models used to predict future climate conditions are only as good as the data that is used. It is only recently that they began to incorporate clouds and ocean currents into these models. What about the impact of solar flares, sun spot activity, cosmic rays, gravitational effects from the solar neighborhood, variations in the Earth's orbit, and the list goes on for extra-planetary influences on the climate. Then there are those of terrestrial nature that may not be accounted for, such has shifts of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth's continents, volcanic activity which is highly variable and unpredictable over large time spans. How can these changes be accurately modeled when there are so many variations in these activities that influence the climate? Bottom line, the data used in these models can be manipulated to return any set of desired results, thus "proving" whatever it is that the people involved want to "prove."

The Earth's warming is a natural phenomenon. There isn't anything we can do about, and there is no valid proof that mankind is causing it. It may well bring the extinction of many species, and not just polar bears, and that is a regrettable side effect. On the flip side, agriculture will spread into areas that are currently unfarmable, thus enabling us to feed the world's population, and we may even see evolution in action over the next million years or so.