Monday, November 26, 2018

global warming/cooling scares throughout history

Via Instapundit:

The American Thinker has an amusing list of global-warming and global-cooling scares over the ages, as screamed from the headlines of heedless newspapers that prioritize fearmongering over the dissemination of facts, starting all the way back in 1895. It really does seem to ping-pong back and forth between global warming and global cooling. Jack Hellner, author of the AT post, has this to say:

In light of the new, much-hyped “official” report on global warming that is being pushed by almost all the media and the record cold that is occurring now in many parts of the U.S., it would be helpful if some enterprising journalist actually reported how often the people have been scared by previous warnings of global warming or cooling.

An article in from 2014 encapsulates the multiple intentional scares from 1895 on. Throughout the entire 120 year period fossil fuel use was growing exponentially, population growth was exploding, and CO2 concentration was increasing. The fact that temperatures both rose and fell during this period shows that there is no correlation between temperature, fossil fuels, CO2 and the human population.

"No correlation"? Personally, I'm not so triumphalist, but I get where Hellner is coming from. A couple things: all signs do seem to point to a very slight average warming over the past hundred years—about a fraction of a degree Celsius. I don't think this has proved quite as significant as the more wild-eyed "experts" claim. Islands that, five years ago, were predicted to be under the sea by now are still above the waves and going strong. The much-ballyhooed polar ice caps often seem to expand, not contract (see here, for example: NASA, 2015). In all, the threat from any "warming" seems, at best, minimal. And these days, I'm hearing more about the sun's entering a period of "solar minimum," in which the star's radiation will, for a period, be measurably less than normal, quite likely affecting climate on Earth. The sun's activity apparently follows an 11-year cycle with peaks and troughs: the so-called "solar max" and "solar min." The solar min heading our way is said to be especially minimal, whatever that might mean. Assuming it happens, it'll certainly throw off any dire predictions of warming—a point made by any number of people, including the makers of "The Great Global Warming Swindle," which argues that solar activity has much more of an effect than anything we puny humans can do to the planet.

This isn't to say that we're not affecting the planet's rhythms at all. I actually take very seriously the idea we could be polluting ourselves into nonexistence. You don't have to look far to see evidence of the megatons of chemicals we belch into the air every second, or the megatons of trash we vomit into our rivers and oceans (not to mention our massive littering problem). While I'm no tree-hugger, I also don't deny that, viewed collectively, we are a filthy species. And if the basic premise of environmentalism is that it's better to live somewhere clean than to live in a toilet—surrounded by and buried under filth—then I absolutely agree, and I applaud the myriad measures being taken both to reduce and to process our trash output. I also don't think that the advent of a solar minimum necessarily confounds the global-warming alarmists: once the solar min is over, warming may again begin to trend upward, either because of the sun's vigorous output or because of human activity. That question isn't going to be settled by the existence of the solar min, but the solar min might force some stubborn people to realize just how much the sun influences global climate.

For me, there's plenty of room for rational debate on a variety of global-warming-related topics. I'm all for open discussion. What I'm not for is basing unsound environmental policies on unsound scientific "reasoning." Science doesn't work by "consensus"; it works by aligning with reality via empiricism and logic. Losing your university job just because you're a louder skeptic than most is an indication of ideology at work, not science. And basing environmental policy on ideology is a dangerous route to take. So is the repression of dissent when open discussion is called for.

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