CHURCHVILLE, VA—Al Gore returns to your TV screen in a 24-hour telethon September 14. He will presumably warn us about the lakes of molten lava that Mother Nature will pour upon us unless we agree to starve in the dark.
The latest bad news for Gore? A satellite study says the East Antarctic Ice Cap, which holds 90 percent of the world’s ice, is expanding. The greenhouse theory clearly says the man-made warming “will start at the Polar Regions.” The satellites show the land-fast ice around the ice cap rose by a statistically significant 1.43 percent between 2000 and 2008.
But never mind all these trivial facts: Scientific American offers us “proof” of the man-made warming dangers—demonstrated just 56 million years ago in the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum! That’s when the single supercontinent, Pangaea, was ripped apart by plate tectonic shifts. Scientific American portrays this as a big release of CO2—but red-hot molten lava and superheat from the earth’s inner core were also venting almost directly into the atmosphere.
So—if we release a lot of CO2 and molten lava into our air, bad things will happen. Ditto if we tear one of our continents apart. A neighbor of mine showed me this article, saying, “This made me more afraid than I’ve ever been before.”
Is our North American continent being torn open by plate tectonics and Al Gore didn’t tell me? I admit being surprised by the earthquake that hit my Virginia home recently, but we only had two teacups broken. The Washington Post said nothing about ripping North America a new coastline filled with molten lava.
If we’re going back into climate history, why go back 56 million years? We only have to go back to 1850 to find the end of the Little Ice Age and the beginning of the Modern Warming. That shift came too early to blame on auto exhausts.
Through ice cores and fossil pollen, we can look back to AD 1000—when the Medieval Warming doubled the world’s human population. How? The long, sunny summers and stable climate doubled food production after the cold and violent climate of the Dark Ages. For a million years, the global warmings have been the “good times.”
We could look at 2100 BC, when the climate evidence shows a “little ice age” hit King Sargon’s Akkadian empire, in today’s Iraq. There was a 300-year drought, interspersed with violent floods. The Akkadians starved. Violent nomads roamed the land.
One of the real experts on the Akkadian disaster is Dr. Heidi Cullen, late of the Weather Channel. Heidi personally dug up the evidence of six solar-driven climate cycles whose cooling phases repeatedly destroyed the cities of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley for centuries at a time. The cities were always rebuilt during the global warmings. Her paper was published in Geology in 2000. Heidi tells us to “follow the science.” I’m willing because her science tells me about Nature’s long, moderate solar-driven 1,500-year cycle.
As for Al Gore, he just needs to tell us when the earth will start warming again—and why we should believe him again.
Citations:
1. Alexander Fraser et al., “East Antarctic landfast sea ice distribution and variability, 2000-2008, Journal of Climate, Sept., 2011. The definition of land-fast ice includes the ice between promontories on the coast, in bays, upwind of glacier tongues that extend into the sea and on the windward side of big grounded icebergs.
2. Heidi Cullen et al., “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology, Vol., 28, April 2000, pp 379-382
