A Simple One Word Answer to Global Warming

When your liberal friends talk about global warming, give them the one word answer that noone can explain: "Greenland."

Eric the Red discovered Greenland in the 980 AD time frame. He called it Greenland because of the lush green fields and valleys. He saw in Greenland a tremendous potential for agriculture. His return trips would bring settlers who would number about 5000 and build 300-400 farms.

What??????? Agriculture??? Farms??? Wait a minute, this country is nothing but a huge ice cap isn't it?

Here is a quote from "The History of Greenland" by historian Murray Lundberg. "The climate at this time was very warm, much warmer than it is today, and crops were able to do well. It seems likely that the name "Greenland" was given to the country, not just as wishful thinkful, but because it was a climatic fact at that time."

And Eric the Red was right, Greenland did become a agricualtural exporter. During early settlement period of Greenland, it became a "Cash Cow" for the Catholic Church. Agricultural goods and animal hides were exported to Norway at a healthy rate. The economic interest for the church was so great that a bishop was even appointed to the territory.

Just as stunning as the revelation that Greenland (or at least portions of it) was indeed green throughout the 900-1200AD time frame, is the mysterious, yet gradual disappearance of the once thriving settlements there. By about 1400AD, the limited records that existed indicate that the settlers gradually died out.

Here again is a Quote from Murray Lundquist: "The mild climatic period was fairly short-lived in geologic terms - by about 1200 AD, the ever-increasing cold was making life extremely difficult, and some years no supply ships were able to reach Greenland through the ice-choked seas. During this period, Norway has assumed responsibility for supplying the Norse settlers in Greenland, but as the climate worsened it became a very difficult task.

By about 1350, the settlements in southwestern Greenland had been abandoned. There is no evidence to prove where the people went to, but one persistent legend says that they went to North America, eventually settling in North Dakota. This legend claims that they were the original Mandan Indians.

In 1408, a wedding was performed in the Hvalsey Church. This is not only the last known service at Hvalsey, but also the last written record of the Viking presence in the region. It is thought that some settlers remained for another 80-90 years, then were forced to leave by the deteriorating climate..."

Wait a minute.....we had a warm period in the 900-1200AD time frame, yet there were little or no man-made CO2 emissions at that time. Certainly, if the periphery of Greenland was that temperate, there would also have been some melting of the ice cap, however large or small it would have been at that time, yet there is no record of the rising seas and resulting flooding in the ports of Europe. The seas were also relatively unobstructed in the 900-1200AD time period, yet became almost unnavigable later on. Isn't this a "global warming" story IN REVERSE that refutes what we're hearing today?

So when your friends tell you of the impending doom of global warming, just smile and say "Greenland". It really says it all.

The Global Warming people have pulled off a PR coup that is brilliant. Amazing. And scientifically untenable.

They have bundled "pollution" and "climate change." Therefore, Global Warming is clearly caused by Pollution, Pollution is caused by man, so Global Warming is caused by man.

OK, pollution is bad. Climate Change (as Global Warmers rather diplomatically have re-named it during the present cooling period) is neither bad nor good. It just is. We deal with it. Global Warming or Cooling isn't caused by man, and neither is all "pollution." The crap coming out of a volcano is far worse than the bondo dust coming out of Rudy's Body Shop, and there sure is one hell of a lot more of it.

Furthermore, we can clean up Rudy's, or a coal-fired electrical plant. The entire Carbon Dioxide as a man-caused greenhouse gas hypothesis is theoretically possible.

But isn't it more reasonable to look at sunspot activity, not to mention our place in the Milankovitch Cycles, first? The Earth SHOULD be warmer right now ... but actually really isn't. "Why isn't there Global Warming?" That's the real question.

Mention "Milankovitch," "Precession," or "Axial Tilt," to the average man in the street today, and you will get the same blank stare you would get from a news bimbo on TV news.

Was your father named Eric?

—

http://www.freewebs.com/alexanco/myvikingsaga.htm

Leif Erikson

“Hello, I am Lief Erikson and this is my saga. Our saga begins in a little village on Iceland where I was born in 970 AD. My father is Erick the Red and he is a Viking.”

“In the year 1,000 AD, I set of on a journey to find a new world and I left with two tow boats filled with timber. Two years later after traveling around the world I saw land and I called this land Newfoundland.

Two years after my discovery I returned to Greenland where I told everybody about my voyages and they awarded me gold and other riches.

After two years after my journey to find new land in the year 1008 AD my father Erick the Red died of starvation.”

—

So much for Viking Legends.

The million-dollar question is: Is the amount of extra ‘greenhouse’ gas we’ve vented into the atmosphere causing significant amounts of extra radiation to be captured? (to the point where it would actually increase the earth’s average temperature and cause changing weather patterns, in addition to other ecological nastiness). Theoretically, it’s very possible.

It's actually not "very possible" when you consider that water vapor (of which 99.999% is of natural origin) accounts for 95% of the earth's atmospheric greenhouse effect.

Carbon dioxide contributes just 3.6% to the total atmospheric greenhouse effect.

Of that tiny 3.6% of greenhouse effect atttributable to CO2, only 3.2% can be attributed to human activity.

So approximately 0.11% of the atmosphere's greenhouse affect can be attributed to CO2 from human activity.

Were we to triple our CO2 emissions, or cut them in half, the effect on weather either way would most likely not even be measurable.

It’s not that “pollution=global warming”, it’s that some gases will absorb/re-emit radiation at certain frequencies. Now all of those gases occur naturally, but we also produce them (primarily through combustion, but also through ‘natural’ ways like cows burping and things). It’s just a question of scale here (are we doing this on a large enough scale to have an effect?).

It’s perfectly reasonable to look at things like sun-cycles, the earth wobbling, measuring incoming radiation vs. reflected/outgoing radiation, natural sources/sinks for greenhouse gases (volcanoes and impacts have had big effects in the past, for instance), etc, and a lot of scientists do. If you legitimately study this stuff, all you do is sit around and think of factors that could affect things, and then try to model/measure them. On the other hand, you have a lot of moron hippies that just want an excuse to think industrialization is the devil, and don’t actually understand any of the science behind what they’re parroting. I put people that say “OMG, the earth had different climate in the past, global warming due to human-produced greenhouse gases is a lie!!!” into the same category. They don’t understand the science behind their position, they’re just parroting whatever someone told them and using it as an excuse to think hippies are stupid.

It’s no better when our side does it than when their side does. I would agree with your ‘blank stare’ comment, and I think it’s a shame that more people don’t study (or at least pay attention when they have it in high school!) chemistry, physics or engineering.

An oldy but goody...Wikipedia is lying up a storm - the freepers with the facts need to hit this page on Global Warming and start crossing swords with the kids from Pravda.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/08/opinion/main4241293.shtml
Lawrence Solomon.

Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works.

As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month.

In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited by the people who read it - anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.

Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.

I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia page on the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, claiming to have exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and found not one single article dissenting from the alarmist version of global warming.

Of course Oreskes’s conclusions were absurd, and have been widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.

Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.

I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.

I soon found others who had the same experience: They would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out.

Now Petersen is merely a Wikipedia “editor.” Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party.

And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore. Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry.

Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors.

“Peisers crap shouldn’t be in here,” Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an “edit war,” as they’re called. Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelly used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding.

Nor are Wikipedia’s ideological biases limited to global warming. As an environmentalist I find myself with allies and adversaries on both sides of the aisle, Left and Right. But there is no doubt where Wikipedia stands: firmly on the Left. Try out Wikipedia’s entries on say, Roe v. Wade or Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia only if those people are not conservatives.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

That was a nice post.

Is it true? It may or may not be. But I'll tell you this - it's more than a little cute to throw out the meteorological and ecological history of the planet when discussing these things. That, in itself, is not good science.

Will we, indeed, can we, destroy the planet? If you're talking particle beam technology for “research” or “defense” purposes, sure. If you're talking about driving around SUVs, I don't think so.

There is more power in the earth than those who profess to be it's defenders will admit - a lot more.

The simple fact of the matter is, every period of human advancement has occurred during it's warm periods. Every one.

Be that as it may, I do agree with your take on exploiting nuclear power. It's a lot greener and more manageable than a lot of “alternatives” being proposed today. The ecofreaks, not a particularly bright bunch to start with, seem blissfully unaware that the hard Left has co-opted them and their movement. These guys will strive to bring down an evil capitalist system they see as despoiling their precious environment, but as soon as a Socialist Worker's Paradise is established, they'll not only be ignored and forgotten, they'll find themselves disappearing and in danger of becoming an endangered species should they loudly continue their folly.

In a word, it's political, and it has been since about 1971.

When talking about this stuff, it's important not to let hubris cause emotion to overtake sanity and the scientific validity of these arguments. In the end, the simplest and most convincing argument (in my view!) against AGW destroying the Earth, is, quite simply, we aren't that good!

CA....

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