A Single Point on a Long Line

Bill McKibben wrote a satirical article on global warming in The Daily Beast recently. The crux of it was that the rising temperatures were engineered by global warming fanatics and CGI. Satire being difficult to do this was only ok, but it serves as a good illustration of the problem in current popular debate: "It is really hot, therefore..."

No one would argue over the weather being hot. And no one would argue that the heat is being artificially manufactured by extremists. The point of argument is over what it means.

There is very good evidence that the earth has undergone warming and cooling periods repeatedly over time. Dinosaurs have ended up in Pennsylvania museums after being trapped in steaming swamps in Montana. Fifteen thousand years ago there was an Ice Age that sent glaciers into southern New York. The Middle Ages had a mini-ice age starting around the end of the 1200's and extending well into the millennium, officially ending in the end of the 1800's. Nova has a program on global temperature saying we are in "the midst of the third major cooling period that began three million years ago" with an uptick in temperature starting about ten thousand years ago.

We are, at present, living in a moment in time, a blip on a huge sine wave curve of temperature change extending out over billions of years. Is our current temperature permanent? Is our current direction permanent?What do temperature measurements mean in days, years or generations when compared to the earth's eons? Anyone with the confidence to answer these questions should be carefully handled; they are either prescient or naive.

Or they are manipulative. Coincidentally, many people who see a huge pattern in this one moment in time are morally opposed to the internal combustion engine, the engine of Western growth. The people who would have us pursue the anti-carbon course point to energy options that do not yet exist and none of us use. Ending that period of human economy would necessarily cause a lot of disruption. Economic decline, loss of wealth, decrease of farm production and transportation---all of these events would be inevitable were we to dial back our use of fossil fuel to the level of the nineteenth century. This would require a lot of top down governmental management, probably done by volunteers from the same group of people who want to cause the destruction.

The history of man is a history of the gradual revelation of error. "The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong....The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant..... His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.' "(H.L. Mencken) 

It is the primitive who see the lightning flash and is certain the gods are angry.