Thoughts on Global Warming

I was having lunch with friends recently when the subject of the weather came up. My friend commented that it was good that we were getting some rain and mentioned the drought out East (Georgia, etc...). His wife interjected those two dreadful words that always seem to come up when something different happens with the weather---dum dum duuuummmm---GLOBAL WARMING!!!

I should have known better because earlier I had recounted a story another friend tells of how he celebrates "Earth Day" by driving his SUV into a pristine wilderness, revving his engine, and shooting down a tree with his shotgun, which I've always thought was hilarious. She didn't laugh. In fact, I would describe her as nonplussed that anyone would find that amusing. But I digress.

Jump back to the point in our discussion when she dropped the GW-bomb. Intimating that a drought, or any weather event or pattern, is caused by man-made global warming is, to me, an effete, knee-jerk response. When I asked her if she was familiar with the Dust Bowl she seemed disinterested. I attempted to explain that during the 1930s much of the Midwest was literally turned to dust by a combination of poor soil conservation and, worse, almost no rain for several years. Being a good liberal, I assumed she had read The Grapes of Wrath.

My point was, of course, that weather changes and cycles. The poor soil conservation of the Dust Bowl isn't something that the current drought in the Southeast has in common with that period. What they do have in common is a severe lack of rain. Her obvious reason for not wanting to compare the two periods is that a lack of rain in the 1930s can't easily be blamed on supposedly man-made global warming.

Driving home the other night I was considering how cold it was. The cold-snap on the eve of Thanksgiving reminded me of many in years past, but it reminded me more of the remarkable practice my friend's wife has adopted, as have so many others, of blaming every weather occurrence on GLOBAL WARMING.

After Hurricane Katrina we were told by Al Gore that we were in for more and more strong hurricanes seasons. As if on cue, the next two hurricane seasons were veritable doldrums, leading some global warming prophets to restrain the urge to make such near-term prognostications.

The vast majority of these wizened witch doctors cannot resist the urge to proclaim with stereotypical smugness that every weather fluctuation is irrefutable proof of global warming, as they whir around town in their metallic blue, hybrid status symbols with their noses pointed to the sky.

They illustrate the foolishness of their false philosophy with each trailing statement of certainty. I often find myself saying or thinking 'well, hasn't this or that weather event or pattern happened a lot in the course of history?' I suggested as much to my friend's wife, bringing up the concept of geologic time, that is, events in the scope of the Earth's age. She, of course, believes that the earth is millions or billions of years old, whereas I believe it's more like thousands of years. But either amount of time illustrates the concept, hers more so. The concept of the vastness of the Earth's age truly dwarfs our existence and the history of our short punctuations on that timeline.

Once you begin to view the totality of that timeline, considering the many disparate climatic periods, perspective and relativity begin to smack you in the face, knocking you off the pedestal of superiority to which 21st century man is accustomed. Consider this gem from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth...we are at a 500 year high in average temperature. That profound statement of fact begs the question, what were we doing 500 years ago to cause global warming? It also reminds me of another much-neglected fact, that carbon in ice-core records always lags temperature by about 600 years, meaning that it isn't a driver of temperature, but a result of it.

Consider the following, when the temperature is high substances in aerosol form tend to maintain a place in the atmosphere more easily than when the temperature is low, which causes the air to sink. It's basic physical science, of course, but you'd never know it if you listened to Al Gore tell this convenient untruth that ice-core records prove that carbon is a driver of temperature instead of the other way around.

Let's get back to prognostications, though. If global warming caused the current drought in the East, why hadn't any of the unanimous scientific community predicted it, specifically? Why is it that they always tell us after the fact, 'oh, by the way, this is because of global warming...'? Why don't they make specific predictions, a year, a month out? Why? The same reason why meteorologists said it was going to rain today and it didn't...because weather forecasting is often as much an art as a science the further out the date of prognostication.

All that said, why should we listen to people who cannot predict the weather next month or next year when they tell us what the climate will be like 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now? Why, when they told us 30 years ago that we were headed into an ice age? The answer is we shouldn't.

Consider the solutions to global warming...higher taxes, decreased development, higher regulations, vast wealth redistribution... Sound familiar? Those are the exact same goals that liberals had long before global warming and, strangely enough, the same solutions for the coming ice age which never happened. It's not that the average liberal doesn't firmly believe that we are destroying the planet. It's that they don't see that, however odd, their solution to economic inequality is the same as their solution to global warming and every other problem in the world. It's that they don't like being presented with the dilemma of historical perspective when blaming every variation in the weather on their current pet theory.

I doubt my friend's wife will consider anything I said when reason made a glancing blow on her worldview. I was glad to change the subject, as much for my friend's sake as my own. Talking about travel plans and movies to watch offered significantly less friction, so I took that path. I learned long ago the Bible's lesson about throwing pearls before certain types of people.