Ice Would Suffice

Some say the world will end in fire; Some say in ice. --Robert Frost

Not long ago I attended a lecture by a global warming partisan who began with the obvious question: How many here are worried about global warming?

Every hand (except mine) shot up.

Most of the audience were young Ph.D.'s in the sciences. Their faces reflected genuine concern as they attentively followed the lecturer's persuasive PowerPoint charts and graphs.

That's when I got worried.

Not about global warming. About the audience's ubiquitous, unquestioning acceptance of theories driven by computer models fed with questionable data and paid for by politically influenced funding. About the steps that these bright, highly motivated people will take as they rise into positions of influence and responsibility, hell-bent on saving their planet. About the influence their articulate arguments will have on their families, friends, colleagues, and students.

I don't blame them for paying attention or for wanting to avoid disaster. But I do believe that they are being taken to the proverbial cleaners.

Here is the argument, courtesy of David Deming at American Thinker, that I would like to have offered those lovely people that evening, if I only had the words:

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously. For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began. Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

[snip]

The oscillation between ice ages and interglacial periods is the dominant feature of Earth's climate for the last million years. But the computer models that predict significant global warming from carbon dioxide cannot reproduce these temperature changes. This failure to reproduce the most significant aspect of terrestrial climate reveals an incomplete understanding of the climate system, if not a nearly complete ignorance.

Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models. But our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. In this case, it would be perspicacious to listen to the geologists, not the meteorologists. By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration's announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.

Earth's climate is controlled by the Sun. In comparison, every other factor is trivial. The coldest part of the Little Ice Age during the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the nearly complete absence of sunspots. And the Sun now appears to be entering a new period of quiescence. August of 2008 was the first month since the year 1913 that no sunspots were observed. As I write, the sun remains quiet. We are in a cooling trend. The areal extent of global sea ice is above the twenty-year mean.

We have heard much of the dangers of global warming due to carbon dioxide. But the potential danger of any potential anthropogenic warming is trivial compared to the risk of entering a new ice age. Public policy decisions should be based on a realistic appraisal that takes both climate scenarios into consideration.

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