The Warm Turns

IBD Editorials ^ | December 30, 2008

[Kaslin]

Climate Change: The Earth has been warming ever since the end of the Little Ice Age. But guess what: Researchers say mankind is to blame for that, too.

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s we've noted, 2008 has been a year of records for cold and snowfall and may indeed be the coldest year of the 21st century thus far. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.

Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. But it was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000.

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop near zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year, the start of a new cycle, the sun has been eerily quiet.

The first seven months averaged a sunspot count of only three and in August there were no sunspots at all — zero — something that has not occurred since 1913.

According to the publication Daily Tech, in the past 1,000 years, three previous such events — what are called the Dalton, Maunder and Sporer Minimums — have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called the Little Ice Age (1500-1750).

[Night Hides Not]

Beyond that, the idea of Indians, without so much as iron tools, chopping down hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest is beyond ridiculous.

Actually, Indians imported beavers to chop down the forests. Of course, that implies that beavers were the first illegal aliens, doing the work that Indians didn't want to do.

History Channel's been showing a two hour documentary on the Little Ice Age. It confirmed my belief that the actions of mankind have a very limited impact on global warming.

[mvpel]

In the book Reading the Forested Landscape, the author points to signs in geography and landscape that indicates that the natives did controlled burns of forest floors every single year.

[sig226]

I’m not being facetious and it isn’t absurd. The timetable was lengthy. And yes, given a thousand years, you could deforst a large region, especially if you wasted the trees and fiddled with the envirnoment.

[grayhog]

The global warming hoax is just like the Y2K hoax - both government directed and based on assumption, theory and hype. Both cost corporations millions of unnecessary expenses.

[mvpel]

Y2k was not a hoax. Myriad computer systems used two-digit years, and could not cope properly with date calculations involving year 2000 dates.

Just because there were no problems with major, visible impact to the public doesn’t mean there were no problems.

[grayhog]

The Y2K hoax was not that computers weren’t using 2 digit years, it was the hype and panic over the coming armegeddon. Its similar to global warming in that the hoax is not that the planet warmed a little over the last 20 years, its the hype and panic over the coming armegeddon.

[SamuraiScot]

In the book Reading the Forested Landscape, the author points to signs in geography and landscape that indicates that the natives did controlled burns of forest floors every single year.

Thanks, I'll check it out!

In a vaguely related note, I also recall reading a journal article on early landscaping by English settlers here. In the Northeast, they found a landscape of bogs and swamps ("wetlands," man), and consolidated them into streams and ponds in order to build tens of thousands of mills and the settlements that grew up around them. Besides powering saw- and grain mills, there was another huge benefit: Mankind 1; mosquitoes 0.

Bad, by tree-hugger standards. Good, by sane ones.