Global climate has always fluctuated: Rusher discredits 'alarmists' who ignore earth's history

The central argument of global warming alarmists is that the past 40 years of human economic activities have added huge new quantities of carbon dioxide to the earth's atmosphere – notably from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal – resulting in a small, but perceptible increase in its temperature.

This increase, they warn, is bound to have big and largely negative consequences for life in general, and human life in particular, over the next few decades. Among these – depending on the computer model adopted and the amount of warming it forecasts – are everything from warmer winters and hotter summers to the melting of the polar icecaps and a rise in mean sea level that will inundate coastal cities everywhere.

Now, nobody doubts that human activity has to some extent increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and will continue to do so. The argument is over the extent. Natural causes are, and will continue to be, responsible for the vast majority of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But the alarmists insist that the human contribution will be substantial and must be cut back immediately at immense economic cost if future generations are to be spared untold suffering.

To the layman, this argument sounds all too plausible. We are accustomed to moderate fluctuations in global temperature, but if any year turns out to be, on average, unusually hot or unusually cold, or has an unusual number of hurricanes or tornadoes, many people are easily convinced that something rare and dangerous is going on and must be stopped, if possible.

What the average person doesn't realize is how sharply global temperatures have varied even within historical times, let alone over longer periods. In the 1600s, for example, Europe experienced what was called the "Little Ice Age." The canals of Venice froze over solid. Six hundred years earlier, on the other hand, Vikings pressing westward across the North Atlantic came upon a huge island so verdant they called it "Greenland."

There were no newspapers around in those days to scare the public with predictions of "global warming" or "global cooling," however, let alone any substantial human contributions to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Temperatures returned, in due course, to what we like to think of as normal.

Over longer periods, the world's climatic fluctuations have been downright hair-raising. It seems likely that we are currently in a warm spell between two ice ages. The last one ended about 10,000 years ago, and there's no reason to suppose there won't be another in a few more thousand years. If so, and if the great glaciers reappear over the northern half of the globe, the sight of a mile-high wall of ice heading south toward Chicago will certainly be enough to focus Mayor Richard Daley's mind that day.

Meanwhile, however, there is evidence that the relatively minuscule effects of "global warming," whatever they are, are simply being overwhelmed by larger phenomena that have been going on for millions of years.

In an article in Science magazine, professor John Stone of the University of Washington reports that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to have been retreating steadily at a rate of about 2 inches per year for the past 10,000 years without any help from mankind. If the sheet melts entirely, Stone says, the global sea level could rise by as much as 16 feet, inundating many islands and coastal areas.

The point is that global temperature fluctuations are an old, old story, in which relatively brief cycles of warming and cooling recur within longer swings of cooling and warming. There is nothing we can do about this. Certainly a 10 percent reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide burped into the atmosphere by mankind would have no effect worth mentioning, except for the millions whose livelihoods would be imperiled by the cutback. Fortunately, the major climatic fluctuations occur over centuries and millennia, allowing us to adjust to what we can't prevent.

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But the alarmists insist that the human contribution will be substantial and must be cut back immediately at immense economic cost if future generations are to be spared untold suffering.

No problem! Nuclear winter will nullify global warming!

I have MS in Geology. Last regular course I took was in palebiostratigraphy. It included the study of paleo climates through analysis of the fossil and rock record.

Most things preserved in the rock record are done so during time on grand scale, millions of years. So, although you might be able to study the paleoclimate for certain period of time of a 50 million year span, you could not go to the rock record to study differences in the last 50,000 years on any meaningful scale.

A geoscientist out of the University of Miami authored a paper where he studied oxygen isotopes within glacial cores. This would allow him to reconstruct the recent paleoclimate on a much finer scale, say every 1000 years. When the temperature increases, the O14 to O16 ratio increases. When it is colder, the O14 to O16 ratio decreases.

Result? The paleoclimate for the last 50,000 to 100,000 looked like a sine wave, with a 2nd fluctations imprinted on the primary sine wave. The temperature increases and decreases in regular cycles, with 2nd Order variations along the way.

The point is that global temperature fluctuations are an old, old story, in which relatively brief cycles of warming and cooling recur within longer swings of cooling and warming.

You mean we humans don't "control" the universe? I'm shocked!

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