The Goldilocks Climate, Part 2
I am not a doctor, scientist, or expert in anything. This content should not be construed as advice or recommendation, but is intended for entertainment and informational purposes only.
Continued from Part 1
Greenland was Green
As recently as 400,000 years ago, Greenland was mostly free of ice. Scientists acknowledge that the planet warms and cools all on it’s own due to its position on its axis which regulates the amount of solar radiation hitting the ice caps as well as a multitude of other factors.
But now, the potential warming and melting of ice from Greenland is all due to human activity, and the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets would somehow be catastrophic because of slowly rising sea levels which didn’t end life on the planet previously. Makes sense.
The Ice Age
The Pleistocene Epoch is a time period stretching back roughly 2.6 million years ago and ending about 11,000 years ago. This epoch includes what is known as the Ice Age.
During this period of time, the planet was cooling in general (which actually started 50 millionish years ago and continues to this day) and experienced massive glaciers and ice sheets hundreds to thousands of feet deep that covered much of Europe, Asia, and North America as far south as Illinois, the planet also experienced periods of significant warming called interglacial periods during which glaciers retreated.
As you can imagine, life during the glacial periods would be extremely difficult. Growing seasons would be quite short so there would be less vegetation to support animal life, and subsequently, human life. Even though much of the planet was covered in frozen water, the climate was quite dry.
Sea levels were much lower during the Ice Age than they are today and odds are good that some civilizations thrived in areas now underwater. I would encourage you to check out Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix that touches on this very topic.
The Ice Age also ended around 11,000 years ago, but what exactly caused the melting of the glaciers and rise of sea levels is not known. We do know that CO2 levels began to rise for some reason, but we have no proof that humans were burning fossil fuels then so it’s likely something else caused CO2 levels to rise. Something had to start the warming process and CO2 is a natural by-product of the thawing of the planet.
But for the green weenies who expect the earth’s processes to stop for them, what is the “natural” state of this planet? Do we want the ice age back where food is amazingly scarce and humans are relegated to a very narrow band of land where it’s warm enough to survive?
And what if we are simply in an interglacial period waiting for the glaciers to return?
CO2 Levels Higher Now Than Any Time In the Last 800,000 Years. So What?
John Kerry likes to inform us that CO2 levels are the highest they have been in 800,000 years. That sounds like a helluva long time until you consider that represents 0.0178% of this planet’s existence.
We can’t know exactly what CO2 levels were even 200 hundred years ago because humans weren’t measuring global CO2 levels that far back, but we’ll take him at his word. We will also look back on an even further time scale using the same type of science to estimate how our CO2 levels compare.
According to the following graph, CO2 levels, indicated by the purple line, are certainly higher than they have been in a very long time, but are not nearly as high as they were for the vast majority of the last 600 million years. We also see a significant delta between surface temperatures (blue line) and CO2 levels that blow apart the idea that CO2 drives temps.
Source: http://ecosense.me/ecosense-wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CO2-Emissions.pdf
If we have a problem with the guestimate of CO2 and temperature levels from 600 million years ago because no humans were tracking temps and CO2 levels, then how much faith can we place in John Kerry’s assertions about CO2 levels and temperatures from the last 800,000 years or even 200 years ago?
Obviously life continued despite the much higher concentrations of CO2 and higher temperatures than we experience today. Could it be that temperatures impact CO2 levels and not the other way around? Or perhaps they have nothing to do with each other at all?
As the vaccine zealots like to remind us about adverse events, correlation is not causation.
The Greening Of The Planet
One of the great horrors of climate change/global warming is that CO2 levels will cause desertification and we’ll all starve to death. Unfortunately, Australia’s National Science Agency didn’t get the memo about this narrative.
In 2013, they published a report on satellite data from 1982 - 2010 that showed a greening of the deserts and the planet overall. Rising CO2 levels lead to the exact opposite effect that the alarmists were warning about.
Source: https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2013/july/deserts-greening-from-rising-co2
How could that be?
Well, as we learned in elementary school science, plants need CO2 to live and grow. The more CO2 available, the more plants can grow and reproduce. Oops. Guess we know why this never makes the news.
Oh well, there’s still all of the wildfires and stronger storms that are proof of climate change/global warming.
More and Stronger Storms?
Ryan Maue, former Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shares the following charts on his Twitter feed.
Source: https://x.com/RyanMaue/status/1686146598613438464?s=20
According to his data, hurricanes of any magnitude are not showing an upward trend nor are they getting stronger. Of course, the experts are concerned that this expert won’t get on board with the narrative. This is only 40 years of data, but it sure doesn't show any trending correlation between storm strength/frequency and supposedly rising CO2 levels and temperatures.
But what about the billion dollar plus price tags that we keep reading about when hurricanes hit?
For one, we have more development in coastal regions therefore there is more to damage. Secondly, the dollar does not buy what it did 100 years ago much less one year ago. In fact, the dollar has lost 95%+ of its purchasing power in the last 100 years. The cost of these storms is reported in nominal values not in real values adjusted for inflation.
Wildfires
The National Interagency Fire Center is the agency which tracks wildfires and acreages burned each year. According to their website:
Federal agencies represented at NIFC are BIA, BLM, U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), USFWS, USFS, National Association of State Foresters (NASF), NWS and NPS. In 2008, a liaison position representing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) was established.
Prior to 1983, federal wildland fire agencies did not track wildfires using the current process. Here is a chart showing the number of wildfires that have occurred annually since 1983:
Source: https://www.nifc.gov/
1983 and 1984 were the first two years implementing this new reporting process, and I question the veracity of the data for those two years. Excepting those two years, I do not see an upward trend in forest fires. In fact, it appears the annual forest fires have been trending lower since 2006.
This is a chart of acreage burned each year:
Source: https://www.nifc.gov/
There does appear to be a definite uptrend from 1983 until 2006 in acreage burned annually, but since 2006, this trend has flattened out. I would hazard to guess that we burned more fossil fuels each year from 2006 to today than we did annually in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s with the possible exception of 2020. I’m also guessing that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than pre-2006.
So what gives?
The Drowning Polar Bears
Who doesn’t know the story about the polar bear than drowned? It was the first time we ever found a drowned polar bear. But that doesn’t mean polar bears never drowned before we finally found one. They do swim in open water and shit happens.
Populations are declining, and if they don’t drown, they’ll melt and we’ll never have polar bears again, or something like that. So we must stop burning fossil fuels and farting.
According to the World Wildlife Foundation however:
Today, polar bears are among the few large carnivores that are still found in roughly their original habitat and range--and in some places, in roughly their natural numbers.
Although most of the world's 19 populations have returned to healthy numbers, there are differences between them. Some are stable, some seem to be increasing, and some are decreasing due to various pressures.
Status of the polar bear populations
Updated 2019 with data from the IUCN Polar Bear Specialists Group
4 populations are in decline
2 populations are increasing
5 populations are stable
8 populations are data-deficient (information missing or outdated)
The WWF is not exactly a climate change denier.
I like to think of myself as environmentally conscious, and appreciate the wondrous diversity of life on this planet. While I am concerned about our impact on other species this does not seem to be a crisis to me. If the world has been boiling and that’s what’s killing polar bears, how do we explain the improving population numbers with higher temps, more CO2, and less ice?
I could keep going with more examples, and you may already know much of this. If not, hopefully you begin to see that there is far more to this complex story regarding climate.
There are many questions we can’t answer with much degree of accuracy when it comes to the climate whether past, present, or future. But the much shrieked about evidence that humans cause climate change, and that it’s bad doesn’t stand up well under scrutiny.
So why all the hysteria and push from western governments for various climate agenda mandates? Well that is a different line of questioning altogether.