For some real-world evidence of climate change, you could point to the wonderful tourist must-see destination at Mesa Verde, the largest national park of its kind.
http://www.nps.gov/meve/historyculture/cliff_dwellings_home.htm
“The cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are some of the most notable and best preserved in the North American Continent. Sometime during the late 1190s, after primarily living on the mesa top for 600 years, many Ancestral Puebloans began living in pueblos they built beneath the overhanging cliffs. The structures ranged in size from one-room storage units to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they continued to reside in the alcoves, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. By the late 1270s, the population began migrating south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona. By 1300, the Ancestral Puebloan occupation of Mesa Verde ended.”
We could turn to Wikipedia to read:
“By 1300 AD prolonged drought had caused the fragile adaptation to collapse and the Mesa Verde area was abandoned. The surviving Mesa Verde people retreated to the south and east.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_Verde_National_Park
So we have a national park that exists due to climate change that nobody in his right mind would attribute to human activity.
Elsewhere, we could read how the ancient city of Rome was fed by wheat raised in areas of North Africa that are now desert, but people who scold the rest of us about what we must do right now to address climate change aren’t interested in ancient changes in the ever-changing climate.
Grain supply to the city of Rome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_supply_to_the_city_of_Rome
Or this from the Wikipedia entry on Tacfarinas, who was a Numidian deserter from the Roman army who led his own Musulamii tribe and a loose and changing coalition of other Ancient Libyan tribes in a war against the Romans in North Africa during the rule of emperor Tiberius (AD 14-37):
...
The war lasted for about 10 years (from ca. AD 15 to 24) and engaged four successive Roman proconsuls (governors) of the province of Africa (modern Tunisia), which, although a small part of the empire, was economically vital as the source of most of Rome’s grain supply....
“The direct consequence of the war was the registration of the entire Tunisian plateau for land tax and its conversion to mainly wheat cultivation. The Musulamii and other nomadic tribes were likely permanently excluded from what had been their summer grazing grounds and forced to lead a more impoverished existence in the Aures mountains and the arid zone. The war also probably sealed the long-term fate of the client kingdom of Mauretania, which was annexed in AD 44 by the Emperor Claudius (ruled 41-54).”
From the Wikipedia article on Tacfarinas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacfarinas
With respect to the idea that humans are causing harmful changes to the climate at this very moment, I am waiting for some peer-reviewed papers that proposes what the optimum climate is for our biosphere. The first question that would naturally flow would be where is our current climate and trend in relation to this finding.
That nobody seems interested in this vital comparison indicates that climate is being studied for other purposes. Since all the urgent demands that flow from today’s climate science coincidently converge on policy solutions that involve statism, bigger government, higher taxes, less personal liberty, the bigger picture tells me all that I need to know about “climate science”.
Excellent post.
bttt