Blowing hot and cold

By David Hines

With snow falling, my thoughts turn to global warming.

Only three decades ago, experts were concerned about the opposite. The fear of global cooling was on their minds. If the global-warming crowd is concerned now, how frantic would they be had a bulk of our national and global resources been dedicated in the 1970s to keeping the world warmer?

We live in the vicinity of a variable star. Despite the popular perception of the sun as eternal consistency, it is an ever-changing fusion reactor. Most visible is the sunspot cycle. However, there are most likely other, longer cycles of varying activity.

It's thought that a temporary global cooling was responsible for the Viking raids. After a time of relatively good weather, enabling population expansion, a downturn in the growing seasons sent men off in search of opportunity at the point of a sword.

The opportunities were endless. Britain, Ireland, and Russia were shaped by movements out of Scandinavia. Normandy took its name from the Northmen, who held thrones in Sicily, and in the Middle East as a result of the Crusades. A new continent saw Scandinavian visitors. In Constantinople, Norsemen served the emperor as elite guards, and others sacked the city.

Just as Germany held itself to be the heir of classical Rome, through the Holy Roman Empire, so did Russia consider itself the heir of Rome, through Constantinople. Global warming expanded the northern population, then global cooling united north and south in a shared paradigm of imperium. The extra people burning wood and peat in northern reaches did not prevent the cooling, nor the social effects.

Second to the sun, the earth itself affects climate. The eruption of Krakatoa caused spectacular sunsets around the globe, due to the dust thrown into the upper atmosphere. Despite the volcano's emission of greenhouse gases, it was a cool year. The dust blocked sunlight. In many parts of the world crops did rather poorly.

Even during historical times the retreat of the last ice age was evinced in changing climates. The Sahara Desert has a few gnarled remnants still surviving of the Sahara Forest. Movements of peoples and the shapes of civilizations were determined in part by climatic changes having nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels or the current population explosion.

Man is shaped by sun and earth. Our actions, whether considered or not, are filled with ignorance about the details of geological and stellar processes. Even the way we think things should be is a product of previous actions. Europe was once thick forest. It was changed over millennia into scattered forest by slash-and-burn agriculture in ancient times. Our perceptions of environmental perfection are but snapshots in time.

Yet environmentalists claim that we can perfect earth's climate through governmental action. It's held that if we curtail our economy, tell people to not use deodorants, and have people outside our neighborhood produce the electricity for our lights and computers, we shall be in charge of temperatures affected by the sun and earth themselves.

In ancient times, sun and earth were held to be deities. They controlled us, not we them. In modern times, we know so much better. We know that to respect the Arctic Circle we must not drill for oil in ANWR, but since it doesn't involve oil companies we can deposit platinum, rhodium, and palladium on the Greenland ice cap. Though we don't know what effect this will have — whether it will warm or cool Greenland — government has mandated the cause, catalytic converters, and government always knows best, doesn't it?

Why environmentalists trust government with the environment is a mystery. It is by far the worst polluter, dwarfing the contributions of private industry. Government is exempt from the regulations it imposes upon others. As government grows, so shall its pollution.

Certainly, there are valid environmental concerns. There is also much about the planet's dynamics that is not known to the level of certainty many presume it to be. The typical appeal to environmentalism bears more resemblance to rooting for a football team than it does to levelheaded scientific discussion. Facts not supportive of the team are discounted; those that do support are endlessly talked up.

So when the guy comes around me at 60 m.p.h. on the way to a red light, presumably so I can read his bumper sticker promoting environmentalism as he slams on the brakes, you'll forgive me for doubting his commitment to the cause. Inconsistency between speech and action does nothing to convince me.

© David Hines