(published October 2013)
A Newsweek article began: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically…” It continued: “The evidence…has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it…” And then: “…in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.”
Further: scientists “are almost unanimous…” and “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change….They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve….the longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
Sound familiar? Well, wait a sec. The quoted article is from the a long-ago issue of Newsweek, when the great fear was not global warming but its opposite---global cooling. In fact, it’s from April 29, 1975. It’s title, “The Cooling World.”
The commonality between global warming and global cooling is, of course, a looming catastrophe on which government must act in order to save us. Only now the doomsday focus has shifted. We must dread warming instead of cooling.
Just an aside (and sorry to mention this) but we’re not really in a hot time. The record high temperature in Walnut Creek was 115 degrees, in 1972, and for the entire planet, the highest recorded temperature was 134 degrees at Death Valley, in 1913. News flash: It’s cooler than that now.
Here’s the point. There are temperature cycles. There have been ice ages, warm periods, mini ice ages, and so on, over the centuries and, indeed, over the millennia. The Romans grew wine grapes when they occupied England----it was warmer then.
The temperature of the earth rises and falls, and it’s far more likely controlled by the sun and the earth itself than by you and me.
Again from the Newsweek article, and quoting the National Academy of Sciences: “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data. Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”
Pursuit of remedies for global warming may in time be seen as foolish as the global cooling remedies like covering the ice cap with soot. The question, of course, is how much damage to our lives and our economy will be done by the global warming enthusiasts before their passion gives way to the next doomsday scenario.
