Global Warming - All Bad?

“Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get” Mark Twain

In the interests of full disclosure I will admit that I am not a scientist, and I don’t even play one on TV; so what follows is a series of admittedly unscientific questions and hypotheses about Global Climate Change (GLOCC).   Since chemistry confuses, biology bewilders and physics perplexes me, I am going to refrain from using fancy charts and climate models to make any statistically valid arguments.  I simply intend to explore the claims and counter claims that are swirling around the carbon dioxide-laden biosphere atmosphere.

              I came of age in the 1970’s, when believe it or not, the climate issue being vigorously debated by both the media and scientists was the danger posed by – wait for it - Global Cooling.  A series a colder than normal winters over a period of two decades had set off alarm bells and had convinced many scientists, politicians and pundits that we were shortly to enter  “Another Ice Age”. (Time Magazine, June 24, 1974) This confused me, because I had always been taught, (admittedly in History Class -where I did pay attention) that we were still emerging from the last ice age. Between us, I was secretly quite excited about the prospect of Wooly Mammoths and Sabre Tooth Tigers roaming around my boring suburban London neighborhood, while yours truly, heroically wrapped in animal fur and carrying a sharp spear, battled up the glacier where the Co-op in the High Street once stood.

Alas the future was confidentially predicted to be somewhat direr and less heroic.  Increasing cold, the scientific community intoned sternly and on the basis of “scientific consensus” would mean that the human race, in 30 years or so, would lose the ability to feed itself.  Less warmth would impede our ability to grow crops, and by the year 2000 we would surely be starving to death in the streets. (The Co-op having run out of food in 1999). If we didn’t do something that very day, or by 1976 at the very least, we wouldn’t even have to worry about other confidentially predicated future catastrophes like Y2K or (ironically) the obesity pandemic.  Dear blue Mother Earth would be well...  a cold blue orb devoid of life just spinning aimlessly around the solar system and bereft of her much loved human offspring  who had finally eaten each other in a cannibalistic frenzy. ( I had dibs on Charlie’s Angels)

Inconveniently for the doomsday prophets, Wooly Mammoths didn’t make a comeback (although the Bee Gees did later that decade) and the 80s bled into the 90’s and finally the 00’s. In the intervening decades, career, marriage, emigration and beer dominated my frontal lobes and I had all but forgotten the ghastly consequences of GLOCC, so imagine my astonishment, when it was recommended a few years into the infant millennium that I watch a documentary called “An Inconvenient Truth” narrated by erstwhile presidential candidate, Al Gore.  Mr. Gore actually was playing a scientist on TV and what he had to say made startling listening.  It seemed that we had moved from global cooling to global warming in the time that it taken me to grow from a clueless adolescent to clueless adult. The oceans were about to spill over the levees and mosquitoes would soon rule the earth.  We had to do something now, or at the very least by 2006, otherwise Mother Earth would have some very hot flashes indeed and who knew what would happen with a menopausal  Earth!  

So, what happened and where was all this malicious warmth coming from?   Had someone turned up the Sun’s thermostat?   Had political rhetoric reached a critical mass and  was in danger of spontaneously combusting?  Well no, it turned out that our dear friend Carbon Dioxide was the culprit and we were making too much of it.   Even a scientific illiterate like me knew that this sociable and amiable gas was responsible for sustaining life on Earth and helping trees to breathe without inhalers. Now apparently, in a fit of pique, CO2, had finally turned on us like a spurned Wooly Mammoth and was gleefully boiling us in our own fossil fueled stew of avarice and greed!

How much CO2 has  the human race spewed unheedingly  into the atmosphere to cause this imminent calamity?  50%, 75% of total CO2?   Well no, it seems that 3.5% of anthropogenic  CO2 was all it was going to take to bake us like a birthday cake.  Happy  Four billionth birthday Mother Earth!  You don’t look a day over 3 Billion, and you had better enjoy it, because time is running out.  By the year 2100 it is all going to be over and the planet will be mainly warm soup with some floaty human bits for taste.  

As we are regularly reminded, climate records  have been tumbling over the last twenty years or so; hmmm..interestingly in parallel with the corresponding increase in 24 cable news. (motto: Never let a  potential catastrophe remain a interesting dilemma)   Every month we hear that it has been the hottest four months in a row,  or  we had the most named hurricanes in a generation, or we are experiencing the warmest winter overnight low  temperatures since records began.  So the question is, when did records begin?   Well actually not that long ago, in geological terms anyway, since the most detailed information exists since 1850, when methodical thermometer-based records began.  Prior to that, we are into estimates and wild-ass guesses (a bit like most TV weather forecasts today). There was of course the Medieval Warm Period, when poor ice fishing conditions forced the cancellation of the walleye competition on Lake Superior.  And of course who could forget the Little Ice Age (1650-1880) which saw the rise of  Mayan package tours to the Yucatan.

Since empirical data stretches back to no further than when Mark Twain was a spotty youth, climate junkies want to know answers to some important questions:   Was it mainly or partly cloudy on May 15, 828 A.D.?    How many unnamed hurricanes, swept across the Western Ocean to threaten, as yet, unnamed coastal developments on an unnamed continent during the late summer of 2012 BC?    Were the Stonehenge builders scratching their heads about the lack of snow during the winter solstice on the isle of Albion in 4050 BC?  When Pontius Pilate was learning to fly, did low clouds in the Spring of  1 A.D. postpone takeoff?   And finally, was it smoking or skin cancer from those long hot Pleistocene-era summers that killed off the dinosaurs?

 As we are never likely to find out, my final question is this.  Global Warming – are you all bad?   The promise of a longer growing season for hops and other vital foodstuffs is surely to be welcomed.  The threat of flooding  will mean fewer hideous vacation resorts  despoiling low-lying coastal regions, which  has to be a plus.  And most importantly,  since I live in Minnesota and it is currently February, how soon can you come over and start warming me up?  I’ll buy you a beer.