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Global Warming: Natural Causes #3
It seems that Global Warming is becoming a favorite topic of mine as of late. Two new pieces published this week help shed some light on the growing debate on whether (or not) the current warming trend is man-caused.
Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, is proving himself, once again, to be a voice of reason in the ongoing debate on climate change. This is from the Financial Times:
Mr Klaus writes that "global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem" and the issue "is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature."
He's right on the money. There are a vast number of people out there swallowing whole the bilge that the current warming trend is being caused by man's dumping of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. The liberal-left are touting it as a means to gain power/control over the world populations. No surprise really, from the anti-freedom crowd.
This particular piece gets better.
I ask myself several questions. Let's put them in the proper sequence:o Is global warming a reality?
o If it is a reality, is it man-made?
o If it is a reality, is it a problem? Will the people in the world, and now I have to say "globally", better-off or worse-off due to small increases of global temperature?
o If it is a reality, and if it is a problem, can men prevent it or stop it? Can any reasonable cost-benefit analysis justify anything - within the range of current proposals - to be done just now?
Surprisingly, we can say yes - with some degree of probability - only to the first question. To the remaining three my answer is no. And I am not alone in saying that. We are, however, still more or less the silent or silenced majority.
I am in agreement there, although anyone who knows me wouldn't be surprised by that.
After reading a lot of material on the topic, from Satanic Gases to Unstoppable Global Warming and numerous articles floating around, it is clear to me that the current warming trend is part of the natural climate cycle that the Earth goes through. In fact, I didn't have to read all of that material; just go back to your high school science classes and the topic of the various ice ages the Earth has gone through does the job.
Klaus also correctly points out that since modern computer models cannot with any certainty predict the weather two weeks from now, how can we rely upon computer models to predict what the Earth's climate might be like a hundred years from now? They can't! Yet people like Al "Carbon-Credit" Gore want you to believe that these models can predict the future. I bet I can do at least as well with a crystal ball.
Meanwhile, on Canada's Financial Post, R. Timothy Patterson writes:
Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.
The piece gets into some details of the research he lead on core samples in the Pacific Northeast as well as the role of sun spot activity, the solar wind, and cosmic rays.
It's a darn good piece and is part of a series being published by the Financial Times on the Global Warming debate.
He ends the piece by mentioning that there is a likelihood that the climate will swing again, this time with temperatures dropping and a repeat of the mantra of the '70s that there was a new ice age coming. It probably will not be another ice age, however I bet that the loons on the left will claim it is a result of efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions and not the natural change in solar activity.
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