By Vasko Kohlmayer
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Energized by the latest election results, the global warming community is getting ready for a major push to stop what is referred to as climate change. Claiming that it represents a major threat to our survival, they argue for tough laws to contain the ecological calamity that is allegedly unfolding even as we speak. at the center of their legislative efforts will be Barbara Boxer, the incoming chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. a fierce environmental crusader, Ms. Boxer has already promised ‘a very long process of extensive hearings.' It is to be hoped that among the many dire scenarios that will undoubtedly be painted, someone asks this simple question:
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that coal deposits exist in alaska?
Given that coal forms from plant matter smoldering in the basins of warm swamps, the alaskan tundra must have once been overgrown with amazon-style forests. But for those forests to flourish a hot and humid climate was required, completely unlike the one that prevails there today.
Even though the possibility of such a profound climatic transformation may shock today's environmental activists, it has been commonplace in the course of terrestrial history. In fact, that history is one of a long series of alternating cycles of cold and warmth. When the Earth's climatic past is expressed graphically, the result is an EKG-style curve oscillating between extremes of some 18 Fahrenheit.
In the last several million years there have been a number of glacial periods occurring on average every 70,000 years during which snow blanketed large stretches of the planet. The latest episode was in full swing only some 15,000 years ago and is known as the Wisconsin glaciation in North america. at its height, most of Canada, the Upper Midwest, and New England, as well as parts of Montana and Washington were permanently covered with ice. The grooves left by the glaciers are visible to this day as far south as New York's Central Park.
The Earth's glacial ages were invariably followed by warm interludes, many of which were appreciably warmer than our present era. So much so, that during some periods even alaska enjoyed a sub-tropical climate and it was during one of those that its coal reserves formed. It was then that dinosaurs roamed the luxuriant forests of the land which was destined to become the frozen tundra of our day.
In the light of our planet's well-documented history of climatic oscillation, the claim that any temperature change must be prevented at all costs is as irrational as it is silly.
Inherent in this thinking is the notion that the Earth's s climate should be permanently preserved in its present incarnation. Given that the Earth's weather has never been static, it would be difficult to conceive of a more impracticable project. any effort to freeze it at the current readings is not only doomed to failure, but wholly at variance with the flow of nature. It is paradoxical that those who normally preach non-interference with the natural order seek to alter its course in such a fundamental way.
Even more curious is the claim that a one degree shift in the average global temperature over a period of a hundred years must be caused by human activity. The argument's fallacy lies in its premise that until the advent of humanity the Earth's temperature had remained unchanged. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Man has existed only during the most recent moments of the Earth's geologic time. If we imagine the whole of its past as one twenty-four hour period, mankind appeared at 11:59:58 PM. In other words, we have been around only during the last two seconds of our planet's cosmic day. Industrialization made its entrance later still – in the final two thousandths of the last second.
and yet all during that preceding time, the Earth's atmosphere kept undergoing sweeping shifts as the eras of ice and warmth succeeded one another in a never-ending cycle. The cold-warm pendulum has never kept still with each of its numerous swings reshaping the previously existing weather patterns in radical fashion.
all these upheavals took place without any input or interference by man. Yet today there are some who profess that any measurable climatic alteration must be attributable to mankind's influence as if things had been static until the SUV came along. This surely must be one of the most incongruous claims ever made and we have the testimony of almost five billion years of history to prove it.
The most surprising aspect of the whole controversy is that those who promulgate this idea still enjoy any credibility. That they do shows just how ignorant our society is about the Earth's climatic past. a couple of simple questions, however, should drive home the obvious.
Did industrialization set off any of the numerous ice ages and global warmings that have taken place in the past? Did man turn alaska hot and then made large portions of it disappear under snow again? Did human activity transform the formerly moist and fertile plains of the Sahara into a dry sun-scorched wasteland?
Man did not and could not have done any of this, because all these climatic revolutions had taken place long before he built his first chimney stack.
all the evidence of the billions of years of terrestrial history makes it overwhelmingly clear that climatic change is not a man-made phenomenon but is inherent in the very nature of our planet's existence.
The Earth's climate is a dynamic, continually changing system which has been experiencing shifts and fluctuations ever since it came into being. Fantasizing about arresting it at its present readings – as some would like to do – is as ill-conceived as it is futile. It is nothing but a doom-fated rebellion against nature itself.
Born and raised in former communist Czechoslovakia, Vasko Kohlmayer is a naturalized american citizen. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Times, Frontpage magazine, The american Thinker, The Jewish Press, RealClearPolitics, and others. Email Kohlmayer at vasko_kohlmayer@msn.com
2006 Vasko Kohlmayer
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