One of the most common logical fallacies we humans have is
anchoring. We tend to see only short
term trends and ignore long term trends.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current “settled science” of
global warming.
We are all familiar with the hockey stick graph showing a
sudden spike in temperature corresponding to the modern industrial age.
I’ve reconstructed this graph from two sources:
and
The first source uses Greenland ice cores going back for the
past 50,000 years (ending around 1905).
The second source uses Northern Hemisphere temperature recordings from
1880 to the present.
Each data point on the first source is approximately 30.63
years. I have therefore used 31 year
averages from the second source for the remaining data points, and adjusted
them by -31.291 degrees to fit the scale differential from Northern Hemisphere
average to Greenland temperatures (i.e. Greenland is colder than the Northern
Hemisphere average by 31.291 degrees).
In any case, we can clearly see the hockey stick graph that
is all over the news. This is the same
graph that John Kerry recently spoke about to show the single greatest threat
to human civilization.
So why on earth did I go back to Greenland ice core data
just to reproduce the same graph we’ve all seen a dozen times?
Well – I want to show you what you are NOT seeing. You are NOT seeing the full 50,000 year
view. By attaching 1880-2013 recorded
temperatures to the entire 50,000 year data set we get an entirely different
picture:
Those low temperatures from 48,000 to 8,000 BC were during
the last Ice Age (technically, the last Ice Age would have ended around 12,000
BC, but there was a comet or asteroid that hit Canada around that time and
plunged us back into the “Younger Dryas” cold spell). For most of human history we were freezing
our fannies off and hiding in caves from the weather. The ice was MILES high well into the United
States. I live on a Terminal Moraine where
one glacier dumped piles of earth to form Long Island New York.
Then about 10,000 years ago we had enough global warming to
crawl out of the caves and start civilization.
If you squint real hard you can still see the hockey stick
at the far right of the graph, but it doesn’t really look like much.
So let’s zoom in a bit to just look at recorded history:
Yep – there’s our hockey stick – still at the right edge of
the graph. But compared to recorded
history we can see that the current temperature has merely risen to the civilization
AVERAGE (marked on the graph in red).
That’s right. We
aren’t looking at an unprecedented heat wave.
We’re just AVERAGE now. It was
warmer in the Middle Ages, even warmer than that in Roman times, and even
warmer than that in the Late Bronze age (when civilization really started to
take off).
And yet, we never see this in the news and never hear
politicians talking about it. You can’t
get very many votes or government grants by shouting “We’re average! We’re
average!” It’s far more exciting to
ignore over 90% of human history and say, “It’s a heat wave!”
Does that mean that we aren’t warming? Well, we haven’t warmed at all for the past
17 years. We COULD warm up to the Middle
Age levels when Vikings grew grapes in Canada and started a colony in
Greenland. We COULD warm up to Roman
levels.
But none of that would be “unprecedented.” A better word would be “normal.”
That said, I do believe that humans can cause warming and
affect the environment. I also believe
that we should study greenhouse gas effects and develop fusion energy to
replace fossil fuels. But we don’t have
to shut out the lights until then. There
is no crisis – unless Roman or Medieval climate levels were a crisis.
Were they?
Of course not.
A bigger threat would be global cooling. I’d hate to see the human race crawl back into
those caves.
It is precisely that long term threat of another ice age
that leads me to support climate science.
If we CAN figure out how to manipulate the global climate, then we may
escape the next glacial destruction.
There are numerous forces at work:
The sun has a 14 year sunspot cycle that gradually heats and
cools the earth.
The sun has a longer period sunspot cycle that has not been
precisely measured. The Maunder minimum
was an extended period of very few sunspots, causing the “little ice age” a few
centuries ago. As we can see on our
graphs there appears to be a thousand year cycle of warm and cool periods that
may be connected to that long sunspot cycle.
We are on a high point today, just as we were 1,000 years ago, 2,000
years ago, and 3,000 years ago.
On more extended timeframes, eccentricities of the earth’s
orbit cause variations in the amount of light that reaches the arctic at 21,000
year, 41,000 year, and 100,000 year intervals.
When those cycles correspond we enter deep ice ages and will continue to
do so until the continent of Antarctica eventually moves away from the South Pole
millions of years from now.
A more detailed explanation can be found here:
My point is this – even though we’ve crawled out of the
caves, we still have the same primitive brains we had then. We live too short lifespans to be able to
keep timeframes of more than a few years in our minds. One billion years from now the sun will have
grown hot enough to burn away the oceans and destroy all life on our
planet. But how long can we keep “one
billion years from now” in our heads? A
few seconds? A few minutes? There are other pressing concerns.
When John Kerry pontificates about the “settled science” of
climate change, he never once mentions the bigger picture that shows us on the
DECLINING edge of an interglacial period.
He never thinks of the fact that the earth was warmer one thousand, even
warmer two thousand, and even warmer three thousand years ago.
No, he won’t mention that.
It’s not good business for a politician seeking votes – or a scientist
seeking grants – to point out the obvious: we are now almost exactly AVERAGE
for the climate civilization has always known.
Who will donate money when there is no crisis? Only a crisis will pay.
It’s up to us to do the math ourselves. The data is out there. Anyone with a spreadsheet and access to the
internet can reproduce what I just did in this little post.
Go ahead. Try it.
But you won’t sell any books.
Tim
