Too Much Hot Air

The truth isn’t the only inconvenient matter in the debate about global warming. In no other field of science are facts and methods debated so fervently. Science requires a uniform approch to solve the unknown, not supposition and certainly not blind faith. But that’s exactly what we seem to be witnessing in the issues surrounding global warming and its suggested causes. Science and faith have not been in such a grudge match since the Scopes Monkey trial.

Now I’m not a climatologist and I don’t purport to take any side in this debate. That may sound a bit like sticking my head in the sand, but I don’t remember waking up in 1984 believing the world was going to end, and the time has long since come and gone when Paul Ehrlich’s bit of pop science in The Population Bomb suggested that the people of the world would starve to death by the mid-Eigthies because, simply, there were too many people.

In other words, every generation has its own version of the End of Days and global warming has become this generation’s Armegeddon. And, as all the other preaching about Judgement day, this one will come and go in the same, quiet fashion.

Global warming is front page news the past few days because the National Academy of Sciences released a report of 155 pages of hysteria and hyperbole, suggesting that the Earth is running a fever and "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." The scientists tell us that Earth hasn't been this hot in 400 years, and maybe longer.

However, they gave no hint that they understood how they had undermined their practiced hysteria. If the Earth was this hot 400 years ago, or even 4,000 years ago, then the recent warming could not have been caused by the madness of man's machines, the flatulence of cows, or even hot air from professors hot to get their names in the paper.

Their presentation was studded with "likely," "maybe," "could be," and "very close to being right," with assurances that their findings were gleaned from tree rings, coral, glaciers, cave deposits (from bulls?), ocean and lake sediments, bore holes and ice cores.

The panel looked at how other scientists reconstructed temperatures over hundreds and thousands of years. Some of it was educated guessing, since there were few scientific instruments back in that day, and a lot of it was to be taken on faith. Scientists are generally not very hot on faith, but they embrace the global-warming doctrine with the enthusiasm of a backwoods Bible salesman.

The panelists said the warming over the past 50 years was something no one had seen in a millennium, but conceded that well, umm, OK, it is true that the Earth suffered a "Little Ice Age" for about 350 years after 1500. But hey, who's counting?

Between the year A.D. 1 and the year 1850, volcanos and fluctuations in the heat from the sun were responsible for temperature changes, but these changes were much less pronounced than the warming caused by man-made pollution in the years since the mid-19th century.

This gets to the point of the hysteria. Scientific Man in all his manufactured glory can't bear the thought that he might not, after all, be as powerful as a volcano or a solar flare. How many learned degrees does a volcano have, after all? The idea that forces of the universe greater even than Scientific Man may be responsible for the cyclical changes is unbearable.

In the end, this is the conceit of Man; that somehow humans are capable of destroying what Mother Nature has produced. And if you remember, it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, less she gives us a few centuries of ice age to prove her point.