Some Thoughts On Global Warming

Full post (here).

Even if we are witnessing the beginning of a long term climate change in progress (and I think it is too soon to say that we are), there are numerous other causative factors that could be involved. We know this because the earth’s climate has gone through major changes long before humans could have been a factor. To assume that the last 20-25 years of warm weather are due to human activity would be similar to having an effect that could be caused by any of ten different factors, and just assuming that one factor was responsible, and ignoring all others. Part of the reason this attitude is prevalent in the area of climate change is that the other factors are not very well understood, so it’s convenient to latch onto one that, at least in theory, is understood.
The mainstream media has played an important role in fostering the idea that global warming is happening, and that it’s due to human activity and that it will get worse. That’s because much of the nation’s media, like the TV networks, are based on the east coast. Whenever there is an unusually warm weather event there, it is a story to them, and they bring in some climatologist or other researcher who believes that global warming is caused by human activity. When the weather on the east coast is cooler than normal, we do not see reports stating that maybe global warming isn’t happening.
Imagine an observer who was present in North America 10,000 years ago as the most recent continental ice sheet was melting. He would have observed the same thing we have observed for the last 20-25 years, but on a much grander scale: a warming climate that spanned hundreds, and probably thousands of years, and the associated melting of the ice.
All of this was happening without the impact of human activity. In fact, the geologic record indicates that there have been four episodes of continental glaciation in the last million years, and each time the climate cooled enough to form the glacier, and then warmed enough to melt the glacier, without any help from man. Back it the 60’s it was fashionable to assume that human civilization has actually developed in an “interglacial” period, and that someday another continental ice sheet will develop. I believe there are some scientists who still hold this view, but you will probably not hear from them on mainstream media outlets.
But even on shorter time scales we have witnessed some major fluctuations in weather patterns. I wouldn’t refer to these as climate changes, because they are of too short a duration. For example, the 1930s (dust bowl era) were warm years. The 1960s were much cooler. The 1990s were warm years. Why did the 1960s cool off at a time when atmospheric CO2 levels were increasing? Why were some our most brutal winters on record in the Midwest in the late 1970s and early 1980s? No one can answer those questions, but it does make one wonder how we can just assume that the warm 1990s and 2000s were caused by human use of fossil fuels, and no other factors were involved.