Franz Kafka described individuals who were powerless to understand or control what was happening to them. I have the feeling that Kafka is writing today’s headlines about climate change. Authorities accuse sceptics of rejecting science while displaying their own profound science ignorance and proudly parade it before an equally ignorant public. Apocalyptic predictions are breathlessly proclaimed, then studiously ignored when they don’t come to pass.
A case in point is our reaction to recent wildfires. The prescription for solving the problem begins with stopping climate change by reducing California CO2 emissions. Overlooked is that if California totally eliminated CO2 emissions and returned to Horse & Buggy days, over five billion people in the developing world would still be rapidly accelerating their CO2 emissions as they pursue our prosperity. China and India would still be bringing an average of one new coal-burning power plant on line each week for years to come, and China would be assisting African nations to solve their energy poverty.
Also overlooked are statistics showing that neighboring Canadian wildfires have decreased in number and acreage burned in the past three decades, with the most acreage burned in 1994 and 1995. Acreage burned in 2020 is only at eight percent of the average of the past ten years.
Fire ecologists say that far more land burned each year during the 1800s and earlier, than in recent years. In the preindustrial era, from 1500 to 1800, an average of 145 million acres burned every year nationwide — about 10 times more than the nation’s recent annual burns. In the West, an estimated 18 to 25 million acres burned each year, as recently as the 1800s.
Our current natural climate change is totally unremarkable in the context of the eight major cycles of the past million years. Exhaustive studies of Earth’s orbital parameters (Milankovitch cycles) during that period determined that they were responsible for alternating 100,000-year glacial periods with short 15,000-year warm periods. It will shock many to learn that Earth’s climate changes have been dramatic; only a bit over 20,000 years ago, all of what is now Canada was covered with ice sheets over a mile thick; Earth’s surface is still rebounding in many places after the ice sheets melted and our current warm period began only 11,700 years ago.
The previous warm period, the Eemian, peaked about 125,000 years ago with temperatures 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea level 20 to 30 feet higher than present. This sustained warmth enabled the hippopotamus to range as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames. The atmospheric level of CO2 reached 280 parts per million (ppm), then fell to 180 ppm (below 150 ppm, plant-life dies on a massive scale) as temperatures dropped and the next glacial period began 115,000 years ago. Both the increased and decreased levels of CO2 followed, not preceded, temperature changes, since cooling water absorbs CO2 and warming expels it.
There have been five warm periods in the past 10,000 years and the first, the Holocene Climatic Optimum (9,000 to 5,000 years ago), was the warmest. Fortunately for skeptics, evidence of its higher temperatures than present left features that are abundant and easily observed. The northern latitudes of Europe, Asia, Alaska, and Canada display tree stumps hundreds of kilometers north of where trees can now grow. Glaciologists have determined that glaciers are now larger than they were then. Studies of features such as coral mounds up to six feet above present sea level are irrefutable evidence of prior warmth because coral cannot grow above water.
Unlike assurances by Al Gore and his “apocaholics,” current climate change is far from unprecedented. Besides the first and warmest period of the past 10,000 years, there have been four other warm periods including the present. After the Optimum came the Minoan, Roman, Medieval, and Modern, each of which was less warm than its predecessor. For roughly the past 8,000 years, Earth has experienced a cooling trend, and studies such as Greenland ice core samples show that the past 1,000 years are the coldest in 10,000 years.
Current discussions of climate change lack scientific and historical perspectives. It is irrefutable that past greater warming did not result in runaway temperature increases, even millions of years ago when CO2 levels were ten to twenty times higher than now. Natural catastrophes such as droughts, powerful storms, and wildfires have all been intensively studied and found to have been much worse during earlier periods.
In California, 1910 to 1940 was much drier than any 30-year period since. However, the past 100 years have been much wetter than the previous 7,000 years, which featured several 200-year mega-droughts.
Every one of the items I’ve mentioned is easily accessible and clearly demonstrates that our present climate change is a part of natural cycles that have persisted for the past two million years. For over twenty years I have made a debate challenge that hasn’t been accepted: “Proposition: Climate change is natural and always has been.” I’ll take the affirmative.
I welcome any and all who wish to debate the negative.
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