Was Greenland Named After Mr. Green?
By phred Posted in Economy — Comments (28) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The US Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the US Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. Environmentalists argued that the byproduct of heat and energy production, and by extrapolation, the exhalant of life itself is poisoning our atmosphere. Imagine if you can, that we are witnessing what may be the beginning of US criminalization of capitalism and every mechanism of its employ as well as the life-sustaining function of breathing itself. All this, while a UN-published study states that cattle farming’s output of CO2 and methane far outpaces that of the contribution of all the world’s transportation sector. I find the lack of a consensus very troubling, particularly as the media is pressing an urgent call to action against a “man-made” global climate emergency.
I would like to comment here on what has become the very vogue topic of global warming. Not a scientific finding, but a reflection of a few items that I find incongruent. I have no letters following my name except “Jr.,” but, for a layman I have studied the subject at length and I’ve noticed an obvious lack of a unified theory concerning the state of Earth’s climate. Inasmuch as proponents report that it is all but a foregone conclusion that the vast majority of scientists (as well as us unwashed masses) believe that man should bravely answer the call to save the planet from us, a surprisingly high number deny outright a change in our climate, though journalists rarely report dissenters except in ridicule. Others agree that Earth is experiencing a warming period, but still debate the level and/or the human contribution to it, if any.
There seems to be great concern by some that Earth will warm one to three degrees over the next century; that our current climate is or was normal and that we must strive to maintain it; that the polar ice caps should continue to be an obstacle to arctic shipping routes and any climatic variation is bad, caused by and consequently controllable by human kind. This warming is of concern irrespective of climate swings prior to the existence of SUVs or even humans. Many of those swings have been of much greater magnitude than the currently forecast “catastrophic global warming” as well as retracted “ice age” and warming predictions made throughout the 20th century and before.
No computer models have been able to dissuade me from believing that we may be in the beginning of an age much like that of the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) when it was warm enough to grow wine grapes in England and the Vikings settled Greenland. Greenland, some may be surprised to hear, was not named after someone named “Green.” There the Vikings enjoyed agrarian settlements for 500 years until 1500 A.D. when the Little Ice Age (which lasted until the 1800s) froze them out. And now, everyone is hysterical that Greenland may again support agriculture. What could anyone have against Greenland?
A funny thing happens at the end of an ice age. You guessed it. It gets warmer! It has only been a 100 odd years since the end of that ice age. Earth has warmed a little (about 1 degree F.) and Greenland still isn’t green. In fact we are still a good bit cooler than during the MWP (about 2 degrees F.) and the Vikings didn’t think that it was too bad then. It seems to have been warming up in that unpopulated environment known as Mars too. Despite its lack of a hydrocarbon-based economy, the Martian ice caps have also become a bit anemic. It would seem that man may not be the villain in this problem, but the Sun probably is. Can our feeble minds comprehend cosmic-scaled cycles whose lives extend beyond the invention of the thermometer; solar seasons that wax and wane over hundreds or thousands of years? Or is the Sun’s role discarded as a mischievous variable? An inconvenient truth?
As a consummate skeptic, some would call me a “Global Warming Denier” which I am not. I do, however, feel that many (learned scholars, political activists, and protesters-in-search-of-the-next-cause) are “Natural Global Climate Change Deniers.” After all, climatologists do have to eat and would have a personal interest in attracting as much as possible of the $50 billion per year that is now being spent on climate study worldwide. It’s quite a rewarding time for such an otherwise mundane occupation. What better way to grab the attention of potential philanthropists, environmental groups and governments than sensational headlines? As time marches on however, we do become anesthetized to mere tepid sensationalism and it does become necessary to up the sensa-meter to maintain the same anxiety level. Headlines reading: “Earth’s Temperature is Average” would not sell newspapers or incite action to a cause or grants to a study.
Research is funded, colorful graphs drawn, meetings held, and voila! The world is saved. Another headline, another grant. But somehow a willing media is allowing a mission of this magnitude to escape critical peer review. The very same information-gathering “4th branch of the government” that can sniff out the one casual letter, note, phone call, or conversation that brings down the fattest cat in the country can look at the entire global warming debate and declare it to be faultless. Truly amazing! If discovered to be unsupportable, decades of wasted effort, resources, and humanity could not be recompensed with a future “Page12D” retraction.
Obviously the state of Earth is the result of all the violent and subtle forces of the universe to this point. Unless the rest of the universe has ceased to be, it is unlikely that it has ceased to affect us. Universe BIG, man small. A stagnant climate has never existed and I feel is unattainable. Earth, the entire universe, has, is, and will be forever changing, and the existence of humans is of little consequence compared to our proximity to an open fusion reactor just 93 million miles away. How can the grandest undertakings of man compare to the slightest ripple in the Sun’s output? Or on a more fathomable scale: If the oceans were to rise, how much could sea level be lowered if all swimmers returned to shore?
With the suppression of credible scientific peer review, the unchallenged idea that our insignificant species can or should try in vain to counteract the effects of the universe is both demagoguery and folly. The unprecedented and likely oppressively burdensome sacrifices proposed by the most radical self-appointed guardians of our climate require our unquestioning faith that their hypotheses aren’t ignoring that the universe affects our climate and that their solutions do not have other than the most benevolent motives. The exceptionally large burden the US has been chosen to bear, contrasted by the “underwhelming” lack of sacrifice by other signatories of Kyoto, expresses that the real effort may be to handicap the world’s greatest economy under the guise of crisis. If Kyoto were pure in its goal of tackling a genuine global emergency, shouldn’t it apply equally to the entire world? On a burning ship, wouldn’t everyone participate in the bucket brigade? Or just those in first class?
Since the "scientific community" insists that CO2 is the absolute demon in global warming, environmentalists have compounded the utter futility of the US’s monumental share of its salvation for the last 30 years, by wrecking any advancement on the path to CO2 emission reductions through nuclear power, by limitations placed on the building of new reactors. Why is there no support for what would be a Godsend toward reducing CO2 emissions, if required--atomic power generation? What are we supposed to do? Live in tee pees? What has happened to common sense?
Water vapor comprises 96%-99% of greenhouse gases, in volume and effect. CO2 is only a very small part of the remainder and compared to methane, an extremely insignificant contributor, but curiously, the only part for which evil humans are responsible and can apparently change. This change is possibly the most painful and damaging to human progress. Could a more benign villain be imagined and a more emasculating course be devised to correct it? And if it were possible to make this undertaking even more senseless, it would be to attempt this now, when the Sun is believed to be hotter than it has been in over 10,000 years, and quite possibly on the brink of beginning a cooling period anyway.
If the human race were to pick a climate or temperature that we felt was ideal and could and should in fact alter it, at what temperature should we set the thermostat? The climate of today? 1000 B.C.? When? What IS normal? What is just right? Before the attempt is made to change the World’s temperature, I would like to be convinced as to what is wrong with Greenland being green. Frankly, I think it’s still a little chilly.
don't forget, it was uphill both ways. Matter of fact, this past winter reminded me a lot, a whole lot, of the winters of 1961-62, and 1962-63. The drifts were as deep, the wind as cold and the temperatures as low as back then. Musta been the global warming that brought it on.
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Phred was a pretty funny character
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I was just reading in Archeology magazine (no friend to global warming skeptics or conservatism in general) that central Sweden was the home of some medieval farmers until, for reasons best left unexplored in the article, it became a bit too chilly to farm...
Phred's piece gets me back to one of my pet ruminations on liberalism - it is all about them. Liberals cannot stomach the thought that they are not the center of attention (center of the universe). The possibility that they cannot control the weather (or blame it on mankind [though, strangely, never themselves personally]) drives them nuts. The thought that they are just a small cog in the great machine of life - with a whole 'nother captain in charge and they are just along for the ride - eats at them.
Thus the possibility that the sun does what it does, without their input, is beyond comprehension nee beyond possibility. Since the facts do not conform to the theory they must be disposed of.
Real climate science is quantitative, not qualitative. And that is the dilemma about global warming. The layman can discuss CO2 versus water vapor, the effect of cloud reflectivity, etc. But their opinions are useless unless they can get numbers, real figures about the magnitude of these factors.
I reckon a handful of people know enough about the climate models to make a judgement, and many people who run them probably do not really understand the physics and the numberical methods. We are left with only the decision of whether to trust them or worry about the effects of their political views or their eagerness to get funding and tenure.
There are more than a few scientists who disagree with the CO2 obsession, and they do publish. The AGW promotion industry ignores them.
Here is a link to one site that disagrees with the models and their promoters:
http://climatesci.org/
I would also point out that Hansen's 'quantitative approach' is turning out to be more than a bit compromised by at the least poor procedures.
Yes, I'm just saying we cannot know the truth from articles that are based on qualitative analysis. If a famous scientist says "I think water vapor is more important than CO2", that is intriguing but not definitive.
It all comes down to the computer models, because they are the only source of quantitative results. The need to be understood and criticized. Is their source code even publically available?
I see articles like "climate models run on home PCs by grid computing!". Who cares? Did they get the right answer? The fact that they play these public relations games makes me think less of them, frankly.
and they are not data.
The models were written by people who wanted support for the answer they had in mind to start with.
There is no dispute at all that water vapor is more of a GHG than CO2.
The Hansen models have failed to account for the negative feedback of H2O vapor. And they seem to coincide with data that is now proven wrong. I think Hansen is so far gone that he has fitted the model to the data he had. Now that the data is showing to diverge he is panicking and seeking to end all debate before he is found out.
So many studies are simply derivatives of his work that it means the entire structure is questionable.
As a skeptic, my obligation in a real debate is to show that the assertion is flawed in important ways.
That was done years ago.
Hansen, Gore & Co., however, have been able to move the goal posts and rewrite the rules so that it is no longer proving hypothesis, but is rather consensus. And they now have people fooled into thinking that the skeptics/criminals/deniers are the ones who must prove their points, instead of forcing AGW promoters to prove theirs.
That is why the shrillness is continually increasing on their side.
I'm not really disagreeing with you. I'm a climate skeptic. If the model is wrong because it doesn't account for water vapor correctly, then he should change the model and run the calculations again. Let's see the new numbers. That's how he has to prove his point scientifically.
CO2, H2O, and Methane block different wavelength bands of the infrared spectrum. Once the atmosphere is opaque to H2O vibrational modes, adding more water vapor might not matter, but adding a new gas that starts to close off another avenue of heat escape can be important. Of course what makes H2O tricky is not just green-house effect, but cloud formation, which reflects sunlight.
Important economic decisions have to be based on carefully vetted science. If scientists are being biased by politics and funding, then they may not be functioning with the objectivity we require of them.
I ran across this nice site on global climate during the period of time Greenland was settled by Norsemen:
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/holocene.htm
It is striking as to how unhappy the AGW community is with the pesky problem of Greenland. They spend a lot of effort explaining it away. But while one can pick one's faith, one cannot pick one's facts.
One of the signs that your pet theory is incorrect is when you spent a lot of time explaining away contrary evidence.
The Ptolemests (who, by the way, had a "consensus") did that in the face of the Copernican model in Gallileo's time, the classicists (who had Albert Einstein on thier side) did it back in the early part of the last century, defending the Bohr model against quantum mechanics. One bit of contrady evidence leads to a minor modification of the theory, then it's found that the modification itself opens up more gaps, and eventually the whole structure falls down like a hose of cards. If you find yourself arguing that you have a consensus instead of presenting proof, the end is in sight.
The Mars data should have wiped the AGW hypothesis off the map months ago, but there's a lot of people with money and reputations at risk, and this isn't something that's going to go away quietly.
_______________________________________________
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I am not so sure Bohr was being defended against qm, however.
it interesting that on a global scale, the Little Ice Age's life extends well into the 1900s. How convenient for the AGW alarmists.
that naming human bodies as polluting systems was really gambling with precedent, to put it mildly.
Just put the evil deniers on trial.
That Kennedy who used to be a heroin addict and is now claiming to be an environmentalist thinks we are all criminals as well.
warm welcome to RedState. I'm overwhelmed at the positive feedback, considering the caliber of writing and quality of intellectual critique that I find here. This ain't the hometown Letters to the Editor, what a relief.
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"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." - The Chief Justice
Imagine that as a headline.
The fact that the MSM and all liberals and some of our own have signed on to the great fear that WE are destroying our planet is just a-matter-of-fact issue ,astounds me. Are we suppose to fall in line with Gore and the rest of the kooks and just accept it as the last word? Amazing,what a way to make money. Sell this crazy idea and have the population of the entire world donate and contribute to their cause while they make hundreds of millions of dollars.
If this farce is not dis-proven and thrown on the trash heap we may all be speaking Chinese. Cause they don't give a rat's pa-toot what any one country says because they are powerful enough (and growing) they don't have to.
Nice piece phred.
And then they came for nuclear energy,
And I didn’t speak up because we saw The Day After and feared the atom,
And then they came for offshore oil drilling,
And I didn’t speak up because we saw The Pelican Brief and feared "big oil",
And then they came for offshore wind,
And I didn’t speak up because Ted Kennedy was afraid his view would be obscured,
And then they came for solar energy,
And I didn’t speak up because I was too cold and in the dark to do anything
-NEO
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I can remember WAYYYY back when I was in Elementary School and first learned about Erick the Red and his son Leif; I remember thinking -- "How did they manage to live in such a COLD and inhospitable climate? How did they grow food on such a COLD island?"
Of course, at that time, in the 1960s we were not concerned with Global Warming -- suffering as we did through long COLD winters -- walking to school five miles through snow six feet deep -- oh wait, that was high school.
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