On Global Warming & Facts

On global warming

Some of us don’t seem to care much about facts these days. Especially abhorrent are facts which disagree with pronouncements made by activists who would prefer for us to believe their views without regard to facts. Or at least without regard to certain facts.

Case in point. Global warming and “ocean temperatures spike” (Star, January 19, 2016). Now I would not presume to argue against global warming. Nor would I consider myself sufficiently erudite to dispute the notion that global warming might result in ocean warming. But I do wish that “scientists” who publish their findings in journals would exhibit a wider range of their academic credentials. I mean, didn’t Geology 101 precede a post-graduate scholarly study in the journal Nature Climate Change?

Global warming band-wagoneers from one end of this planet to the other seem to have slept through the first chapter of Geology 101. That’s the chapter explaining that our planet has experienced at least five major and several minor periods of “ice ages.” Now here’s a fact these “scientists” seem to have ignored. Each of those “ice ages” was followed by global warming. How do we know this? Well, for starters, the ice melted.

Of greatest interest to us – the modern day descendants of homo east-coastus-Americus – is the most recent of these many ice ages. You see, that “ice age” of the late Pleistocene epoch is the one whose glaciers, according to New York Nature.net “literally created Long Island, and carved out the landscape we know today as the New York City region. Moraines, lakes and ponds, kettle holes, peat bogs, melt water streams and valleys – all are relics of glacial topography.”

So it seems some scientists use “ice age” information one way, some another. If your business is constructing One World Trade Center, you most assuredly want to know the difference between bedrock and a glacial moraine. But many “scientists” whose favorite topic is global warming seem eager to ignore the lessons of ice ages.

It takes little more than an introduction to Logic 101 for most of us to recognize that for every ice age there has followed a period of global warming. (Please check a geological time scale.) Moreover, climate change is influenced – and has been so for eons – by many factors. Solar energy output varies; both the sun and our planet earth are constantly in motion. Everything out there where “the heavens declare the glory of God” is moving. Earth spins (rotates) and races around its orbital path. And so does the Sun whose orbit takes it on a journey through our galaxy. Small wonder, then, that a wobble here and a solar eruption there might result in a pile of ice once and clouds of steam the next time.

So, please. Let us recognize that when we are faced with political posturing and perambulation, we are better off to rely upon facts – even the inconvenient ones – than to beguile ourselves with half-baked writings of “scientists” who slept through Geology 101.