Climate change--There is nothing it can't do?

 Mark C. Ross:

Perhaps because of desperation or just plain ignorance, climate alarmists are now blaming both droughts and floods on global warming/climate change.  Where it rains or doesn't is largely determined by prevailing winds, not atmospheric heat-trapping.  And yet, the chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors recently posted an op-ed in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat stating such nonsense — along with blaming her son's pneumonia on climate change, rather than the opportunistic bacteria that infected him while his immune system was weakened by a cold.

What used to just seem like a hoax no longer leaves any room for doubt.  And yet, there are way too many (ahem) useful idiots predisposed to fear for the end of the world.  I am inclined to say doomsday cults are particularly seductive because they release their adherents from the day-to-day drudgery of going through ordinary life. 

Historically, I like to place the beginning of atmospheric heat-trapping hysteria in 1990, when NASA's Magellan Venus probe sent back telemetry showing the planet's surface temperature to be much hotter than expected.  Sixteen years later, the midterm election of 2006 returned the House of Representatives to the Democrats, and global warming became a major political issue. 

Considering the lust for power that animates ambitious politicians, climate change/global warming is made to order.  Not only can it easily generate fear, but its authenticity or lack thereof defies simple observation.  The geologic oscillation between ice ages and warm periods occurs in a time frame way beyond a human lifespan.

History is fraught with the consequences of various weather trends.  Scientific American, before it became seriously woke, published an article that declared the last 2,000 years to be a period of unusually mild weather.  The evidence of previous severe conditions was fairly clear.  A different article concerned the hydrologic deficit of the Mediterranean Basin.  The rivers that flow into the basin do not provide sufficient water volume to compensate for evaporation.  Primarily, the Sudd on the Nile seriously diminishes what reaches the basin.  The author, with good reason, speculated that the Mediterranean Basin was dry until the Pleistocene ended and the Atlantic rose and flowed over the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) and flooded the Mediterranean.  He speculated that there may have been human witnesses to this event — the possible origin for the Atlantis legend.

Between 1645 and 1715, there occurred the Maunder Minimum — also known as the Little Ice Age.  This is fairly common knowledge and was the result of the sun taking a nap.  With today's scientific advances, would such a phenomenon be predictable?  Such would be fairly speculative, and, thus, we continue to remain captives to the whims of nature.

Suffice it to say that weather often establishes short-lived trends, which are not necessarily evidence of the overall direction of climate change.  It takes time to connect the dots, although climate has never been constant and is thus always trending in one direction or another.

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There is more.

This first recorded flood to my knowledge was in the Hebrew Bible when Noah saved his family and animals by building an Ark. Geologists have found some evidence of this flood in the Middle East.  Later in the Bible, Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers who were jealous of a coat his father gave him.  While in Egypt Joseph predicted good years for crops to be followed by a famine which was apparently caused by a lack of rain.  He persuaded the Egyptians to store grain for the coming famine. These indicators demonstrate that climate change has been around long before anyone ever thought of using fossil fuels for transportation.  

As Ross notes there have been several climate changes since then.  Many of them have to do with planetary movements.  I remain skeptical of the Chicken Little Science of the current climate change crowd.  One of my reasons for skepticism is the serial failure of the predictions and projections of the climate change crowd.  The poles are still not ice-free and New York is still not underwater.