DESPERATE CLIMATE-TORS!

By Paul Driessen

You can hear, feel and almost taste the desperation within the dyed-in-the-wool climate alarmist camp.
The planet is no longer cooperating with their cataclysmic warnings. It is in fact not warming “furiously” and “dangerously” – not any longer, or ever in recent millennia. Their favorite whipping boys – carbon dioxide, fossil fuels, Western living standards and civilization – may not be guilty of planetary murder, after all.
So now, to protect and advance their Copenhagen agenda, it is critical that they rewrite history, delete the inconvenient episodes, pooh-pooh ignorant geologists who bring up Earth’s history of never-ending climate change, and create some idyllic past when Planet Earth was forever bathed in constant temperatures, summer lingered ‘til September, winter exited March the second on the dot, and by order of the Crown the climate was perfect all year. Thus we hear from Reinhold Leinfelder and Tagesspiegel in the November 10 CCNet that:
“… the CO2 emitted by us is now gathering in the atmosphere, unlike other greenhouse gases over thousands of years, where it now exceeds all historical values for at least a million years. Therefore, the CO2 increase is the main driver of the processes warming.
“Our civilization, based on agriculture … relies on a stable climate. So far, we have been lucky: In the last 5000 years, the climate at a global (not regional) level has only varied by a few tenths of a degree per 100 years. Only the 20th Century, with its warming of 0.8 degrees, is an exception.
“Planet Earth did not care three million years ago that the climate was about three degrees warmer and sea level was 25 to 35 feet higher. For our civilization today, a rise by just one meter would have negative consequences.” Et cetera.
So the proof is in, Leibfelder claims. CO2 levels are rising, due mainly to human activities. QED. This is, ipso facto, proof that carbon dioxide is “the main driver” in global warming. The natural forces have simply ceased to exist, one must assume, or at least no longer play a noticeable role in climate change.
But now that planetary temperatures have stabilized and even dropped a bit, is CO2 also the main driver in global cooling? That would be rather complicated, and inconvenient. As would these other inconvenient truths:
Sea levels have risen 400 feet since the last Ice Age ended, and all those mile-thick glaciers melted. Granted, 11,000 years ago is a bit more than 5,000 years. But it is quite a bit less than the “three million” years ago that those troublesome geologists were talking about in Berlin – before they discussed the Pleistocene and even more recent Earth history. Did mammoth flatulence and cave man fires perhaps cause those repeated glacial and interglacial epochs?
In northern Africa, green river valleys used to be home to contented hippopotami and happy human villagers. Then, rather suddenly, 4,000 years ago, the region somehow metamorphosed into the Sahara Desert. That’s certainly within Leinfelder’s highly selective time frame. Do you suppose Egyptian slaves did it, cooking over their open fires, while also breathing very heavily as they built pyramids for pharaohs?
What about the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age? Fires from sacked cities, perhaps? Admittedly, the Northern Hemisphere isn’t exactly planetary. But it’s a lot of territory. (And maybe the Southern Hemisphere doesn’t count now, since this much more watery expanse doesn’t behave quite the same way as its Northern cousin.) But in any event, how did our ancestors, even more dependent on agriculture than we are – and even less technologically advanced – manage to cope? Historians tell us they ADAPTED! One would suppose we could adapt, as well, since thinking humans don’t usually just sit there and get pummeled by callous natural forces, and we have learned a lot over the past centuries.
What about the Dust Bowl? It blew away soil, destroyed agriculture and displaced thousands of American families. It was a climate disaster, by any definition. It was the same kind of regional disaster that Climate Armageddonites routinely seize on to “prove” global warming. Did the Model T, Wright Brothers or World War I cause that extended drought? Did the Dust Bowl destroy the planet? What made it go away? More carbon dioxide, which presumably cooled the planet until 1975, when we had the global cooling scare? And is CO2 now causing planetary temperatures to stabilize and even cool off again, after a 20-year interlude of warming?
All this alarmist caterwauling and revisionist history really is getting a bit tedious, though it is also very amusing – and great fodder for cartoonists.
Does Herr Leinfelder really think the 1975-1998 temperature was ideal? Or perhaps the much cooler average global temperature between 1940 and 1975 were more ideal? Or during the twenties and thirties? Or maybe during the Roman or Medieval times, or Greenland’s during the Viking Colonization period? Or maybe it was the Little Ice Age global average, of just a few centuries ago? (Or maybe, as Michael Mann suggests, the LIA never happened.)
Does Leinfelder really think we humans can set the Earth’s thermostat? And who exactly does he suppose should have the power to decide what is the “ideal” temperature, humidity, rainfall and storm setting for Planet Earth and all its various regions?
One more inconvenient question. How exactly does he know global climate varied by only “a few tenths of a degree per 100 years” during the last 5000 years. That’s quite a precise estimate. Did he perhaps find a stash of Celtic, Inca, Mesopotamian, ancient Chinese and late Neolithic thermometer data that had been overlooked by historians? Perhaps it was filed among the “missing” CRU data? Or with Dr. James Hansen’s airport, blacktop and air conditioning-modified ground temperature measurements?
As I said, you can almost taste the desperation. Bring on Copenhagen. It will be a very entertaining circus.
Paul Driessen
Senior policy advisor
Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality