While I have no doubt that we are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that CO2 has an effect on warming the atmosphere, I don't assume our efforts surpass all other factors. Indeed, it would be shocking if we weren't warming the last 150 years as the Little Ice Age ended.
And you know what is really scary? It was a "little" ice age. I know, I know, fifteen years is too short a time to measure climate according to the global warming true believers. So the last 15 years of statistically flat temperatures don't count. One hundred and fifty years is good. Or even 400.
But what about 1200 years? What about 5,000 years of recorded history? Eleven thousand years since man developed agriculture? How about looking back further before man fouled the world?
Because if you do that, if you're the pants wetting type over this issue you'll need to worry about something else altogether (tip to Instapundit):
In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stand stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.
Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.
Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.
Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.
For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.
Quite. I'm not on the nanotech cheering team, so I'm neutral on that point, but he's right that these issues should be debated on their own narrow merits and not treated as planet-saving things that must be done--now!
Treating the late 1970s before our most recent temperature increase run as the natural baseline of our climate that we must defend to the hilt is just nonsense. If it is within our power to affect the global temperature, wouldn't it be better to determine the ideal global temperature and move toward that number--whether higher or lower?
One day the deniers may be the Prius owners who refuse to install CO2 generators on their vehicles.
