In “The Case for Climate Change Alarmism,” Forbes.com contributor William Pentland earlier this week called our attention to a paper released by researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory asserting that a large range of uncertainties regarding the potential effects of global warming justifies long-term and presumably far-reaching political action. The Sandia paper, however, gives undue weight to far-fetched climate scares while largely ignoring the real-world evidence of the many benefits of a moderately warming climate. By properly considering all factors, negative and positive, it is hard to make a case for climate change alarmism.
The first principle we need to keep in mind regarding climate change alarmism is context. While it is true that global temperatures have risen somewhat during the past 100-plus years since the Little Ice Age ended, there was little room for temperatures to go at the time but up. The Little Ice Age, lasting from approximately 1300-1900 A.D., brought the planet’s coldest extended temperatures during the last 10,000 years. Saying that temperatures have risen by 1 degree or so since the end of the Little Ice Age tells us essentially nothing in the long-term temperature context because the arbitrary baseline of the Little Ice Age was an exceptionally cold climate anomaly.
Keeping this long-term temperature context in mind, global warming alarmists frequently assert that a given month, year, or decade was “the hottest in recorded history,” but that statement only holds true because alarmists conveniently define “recorded history” as the past 130 years or so since the depths of the Little Ice Age. Alarmists justify this convenient definition of “recorded history” based on the establishment of a relatively global system of weather and temperature stations approximately 130 years ago. Fair enough, but proxy climate data from a variety of sources, including ice cores drilled in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, demonstrate that global temperatures were warmer than today for most of the past 10,000 years. Human civilization first developed, and thereafter thrived, during climate conditions warmer than today. Today’s temperatures, in a more appropriate long-term context, are unusually cold, not hot.
In “The Case for Climate Change Alarmism,” Forbes.com contributor William Pentland earlier this week called our attention to a paper released by researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory asserting that a large range of uncertainties regarding the potential effects of global warming justifies long-term and presumably far-reaching political action. The Sandia paper, however, gives undue weight to far-fetched climate scares while largely ignoring the real-world evidence of the many benefits of a moderately warming climate. By properly considering all factors, negative and positive, it is hard to make a case for climate change alarmism.
The first principle we need to keep in mind regarding climate change alarmism is context. While it is true that global temperatures have risen somewhat during the past 100-plus years since the Little Ice Age ended, there was little room for temperatures to go at the time but up. The Little Ice Age, lasting from approximately 1300-1900 A.D., brought the planet’s coldest extended temperatures during the last 10,000 years. Saying that temperatures have risen by 1 degree or so since the end of the Little Ice Age tells us essentially nothing in the long-term temperature context because the arbitrary baseline of the Little Ice Age was an exceptionally cold climate anomaly.
Keeping this long-term temperature context in mind, global warming alarmists frequently assert that a given month, year, or decade was “the hottest in recorded history,” but that statement only holds true because alarmists conveniently define “recorded history” as the past 130 years or so since the depths of the Little Ice Age. Alarmists justify this convenient definition of “recorded history” based on the establishment of a relatively global system of weather and temperature stations approximately 130 years ago. Fair enough, but proxy climate data from a variety of sources, including ice cores drilled in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, demonstrate that global temperatures were warmer than today for most of the past 10,000 years. Human civilization first developed, and thereafter thrived, during climate conditions warmer than today. Today’s temperatures, in a more appropriate long-term context, are unusually cold, not hot.
The second principle we need to remember is that the earth’s long-term temperature history gives us proof that warmer temperatures have in the real world always been better for human civilization than colder temperatures. The Little Ice Age was typified by crop failures, famines, plagues, extreme weather events and human population contractions. By contrast, our recently warming temperatures have been a welcome reprieve from the harsh and unusually cold conditions of the Little Ice Age. During the past century, as global temperatures have risen forests have expanded, deserts have retreated, soil moisture has improved, crops have flourished and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes have become less frequent.
While our ability to document the frequency of famines, plagues, droughts, hurricanes, etc., is more limited in the millennia before the Little Ice Age, we do know that during these warmer millennia human civilization thrived and the planet’s climate was not thrown into a chaotic downward spiral. Indeed, the earth’s climate remains quite benign despite these thousands of years of recent warmer temperatures.
This really gets to the heart of the Sandia paper. If we have real-world evidence that temperatures were warmer than today during most of the past 10,000 years (and also during several interglacial warm periods during the past few million years), and if we also have real-world evidence that human civilization thrived during these warmer temperatures and the warmer temperatures did not trigger so-called “tipping points” sending the planet into a climate catastrophe, then we have very little reason to believe that our presently and moderately warming temperatures are now poised to send the planet into a climate catastrophe.
For many scientists, this distinction between theory and real-world conditions is what typifies the differences between so-called “alarmists” and “skeptics.” As Colorado State University emeritus professor and hurricane expert William Gray frequently explains, alarmists base their climate alarmism on speculative computer models programmed and run within the confines of cubicles and drywall. Skeptics, on the other hand, base their skepticism on real-world data and observations.
The Sandia paper may present an interesting theory that global warming may produce an imminent climate catastrophe within a chaotic global atmosphere, but the theory is strongly contradicted by thousands of years of real-world data and real-world climate observations. The Scientific Method dictates that real-world observations trump speculative theory, not the other way around.
