Global Averaging
By Bruce Walker (08/25/05)
Global warming is raising its silly head again in public discourse. In one respect, the hubbub about global warming is serious business. This cartoon specter influences national and international policies and attitudes. “Alaska is melting” men like Senator McCain tell an America which, according to the dogma of the Left, should be duly alarmed.
In another respect, however, global warming is such a profoundly silly issue that trying to deal with it as a scientific issue is like trying to debate philosophy with a dog. The Left, which violently resists any notion that nature does not naturally evolve, which believes that life itself came out of a changing Earth, with radical shifts in temperature and chemical composition of the atmosphere, seems to find modest changes in the most innocuous of all changes, temperature, terrifying.
The presumption of geologists for centuries has been that the temperature of the Earth is always changing, but changing very slowly. Ice ages and the movement of glaciers are conclusive proof that the temperature of huge parts of the Earth have dramatically changed over the different eras of our planet.
These changes, much more dramatic than anything the Left projects, were presumably before man entered the flow of history. So does this mean that man has not experienced or survived significant changes in temperature? Again, the science so eagerly embraced by the Left belies that. Cavemen dwelt in the caves of France during the Ice Age. The Eurasian and American landmasses were much colder during the period in which men crafted flint knives and skinned bison and other cold-weather animals in places close to what had been long known as the sunny Riveria.
So has the Earth been warming ever since then? Is man simply accelerating dangerously a natural process? Again, it is difficult to know where Leftism begins and its two close siblings, Ignorance and Stupidity, begin. We do not even need to rummage through carbon dated materials to know whether the warming of the Earth has been constant or not. We have historical proof that the flow has been back and forth.
A few hundred years ago, while substantial bodies of historical literature from different sources were compiling record as events occurred, Norway, Scotland, Iceland and Sweden were much warmer than they are today. Crops were grown in these areas where it is too cold to grow crops now. When the Vikings settled Iceland, one third of it was covered with trees; today, there are almost no trees, and Iceland has a very small population which has little impact upon the environment: Iceland became, over the last several centuries, significantly colder.
Europe in the Middle Ages, when technology, pollution, and population were much smaller than today, was warmer than it is today. Wine grew in much of southern England. As the Earth warmed, people and civilization grew out of the colder Dark Ages, when the amount of arable land and the variety of cultivatable crops were less. What happened over the centuries since the Middle Ages has actually been global cooling.
Norway, Iceland and Scotland are much colder than they were eight hundred years ago. Nature, not man, changed the temperature with a corresponding effect on all living creatures, including man. Did man die out? Did this cause an apocalypse? Of course not! We have very detailed, written records from places on our planet where the cooling of the Earth was occurring and changing how people lived.
The salient fact is that the consequence was so trite that almost no one even bothered to write about it, and no one thought it a calamity. All of this was pre-industrial revolution, pre-scientific revolution, pre-technological revolution, pre-population explosion. Life went on with so little effect that history books mention the re-freezing of much of inhabited Europe with scarcely a footnote, though never a doubt.
Ironically, when Robert Ardrey, author of The Territorial Imperativeand other books about the evolution of man, wrote his last work, The Social Contract, in 1970, he was warning about how man would survive the coming and certain new ice age. The Earth, he observed after decades of study and travel, was getting colder all the time.
What do we really have today? Is the Earth getting colder or hotter? Who knows? (And who cares?) And what should we call whatever may be happening now – warming or cooling, or warming then cooling? How about this: how about calling this comic Leftist crisis “Global Averaging”?
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