Regards, Ivan
Posted on 10/21/2002 10:33:45 PM PDT by MadIvan
This week the climate change caravanserai has moved on from Kyoto, via The Hague and Marrakesh, to Delhi, where portents of our imminent demise will be divined from the entrails and innards of computer models.
It is time to say “enough”. This latter-day millenarian nonsense has to stop. Our childish discovery that climate alters is making a mockery of science, of history, of the long and turbulent geology of the Earth, and of human adaptation to climate and weather from time immemorial, and long before.
The nadir was plumbed, as so often, on the Today programme when a well-meaning, tear-stained voice lamented the plight of the poor plants and anxious animals which could not be expected to cope with change. The comment was so wet that you could shoot snipe off it. Good grief! Nature has been coping with change since some archaic Nigella was stirring the primal amino acid soup while earthquake, fire and flood raged all around. “I just love those rich blue-green stromatolites, don’t you?” (Sly, girlish glance.)
So, a few benighted birds, such as the lesser-striped sporan, might have to migrate to live in Sweden: how dreadful. And think of our feathered friends from the South: they might have to seek asylum in Britain under Blunkett’s brutal regime, confined to a webfooted wilderness in the Fens. Meanwhile, back in the hedgerow, spring was dangerously early this year and the autumn colours are not quite the same. “We’re all doomed!” as Private Fraser would intone, with twisted mouth and goggle eyes.
Has nobody read Gilbert White’s 18th-century journals? “Oct 18. 1770. Vast floods on the Sussex rivers: the meadows all under water. Nov 15. Vast rain at night. The ground so wet that no sowing goes forward.” And then: “Oct 26. 1781. Men sow their wheat in absolute dust. Oct 31. The water is so scanty in the streams that the millers cannot grind barley sufficient for mens (sic) hogs.” All is change, past, present and future. And would our beleaguered farmers not have revelled in the years between 1100 and 1300, when May frosts were virtually unknown? Yet, by the winter of 1309-10, dogs were hunting hares on the hard frozen Thames and bread, even when wrapped in straw, froze solid in the larders.
But the 22-carat gold nonsense starts when our politicians declare that we can manage climate change to produce “a sustainable climate” — the world’s most outrageous oxymoron. I have this preposterous vision of a quixotic Michael Meacher, accompanied by a faithful Sancho Prescott, tilting at the Sun, capping exploding volcanoes, diverting conveyer-belt ocean currents with snorkels to the fore, and, like Superman, heaving meteors back into space. The idea that, by fiddling about with a couple of politically chosen gases (carbon dioxide and methane), we can make climate do what we want is one of the most dangerous myths of our post-industrial age.
Perhaps I should play Lex Luther, Superman’s alter ego. If you really want to mess up the world’s climates, especially in the Tropics, then cover the Tibetan high plateau with black plastic sheeting and see what that does to the subtropical jet stream, the monsoons, and Lois Lane’s hairdo and make-up.
This bunkum over climate is warping policy. The “threat of global warming” is too often a mask for those who want no growth, no development and no globalisation. And the “renewable” energy alternatives either do not work or are not “renewable”. Even a man from The Times could not get the hydrogen car to go last week (it was raining), while you need lots of energy to produce the hydrogen. Many solar cells likewise take more energy to make than they give out, wind farms are despoiling much of the landscape, hydroelectic power disperses both fish and folk, tidal energy wrecks estuarine ecosystems, and we cannot have nuclear fission or fusion at any costs, can we? It is all carbon claptrap.
The author is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London
Regards, Ivan
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More of Professor Stott's papers can be read here.
I couldn't find an email,he has a guestbook and also a poll question towards the bottom of the page...you know what to do FReepers. ;-)
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Climate has always been changeable and always will be... the examples Stott chooses are right on the spot and there are many more in English writings, as far back as the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
PS Ivan, could you please add me to your ping list?
Regards
Mike
Done, my thanks.
Regards, Ivan
BUMP.
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1.) No;
2.) Yes;
3.) Don't know.
