"It ain't what we don't know that hurts us, it's what we do know that ain't so."
- Will Rogers
How many of us know why Greenland is called Greenland? Come on now, raise your hands. I see a few. Good.
For those who don't know why a subcontinent which appears to be covered with glacial ice is called
Greenland - and it really is a puzzler - I will elucidate. Eric the Red and his son Leif helped establish a colony in southern Greenland to take advantage of the rich farmland and low population density (a group of Irish preceded them but left before the Vikings arrived). The land was cold in winter but warm in summer, warm enough to raise crops and cattle and even establish a robust trade with people from the British Isles and nearby countries. All this began in 991 AD.
The settlement remained until the early 13th century, when they were frozen out by the changing climate. The ground became so hard they couldn't bury their dead and had to cremate them. The crops failed and they couldn't feed their dairy cattle, so they had to eat them. And eventually Greenland was pretty much covered with ice and everybody either packed up and went back to Norway or died. Given the much lower population density of the Earth back then, and the far lower level of pollution-creating technology, it's highly unlikely that human activity brought on this climate change.
My point? Global cooling and global warming have been happening for thousands of years. Sometimes asteroids or meteorites or comets cause problems, sometimes volcanoes erupt and cause problems, sometimes the sun heats up or goes into an intense solar flare cycle or even cools down.
Here\'s a description of a solar flare in 1859 that shorted out telegraph wires on the East Coast of the US and started a number of fires.
And sometimes the climate changes for no apparent reason, like in the late 13th century. Did you know that southern England was warm enough to grow grapes similar to the ones now grown in southern France? And that the resulting wine was famous world-wide? And that the global cooling in the early 13th century wiped out the crops? Maybe we're just getting back to what was the norm a thousand years ago.
Or maybe Al Gore was right and we're all doomed, doomed, I tell you!
Is the climate changing? Yes. That's not open for debate. Our climate is changing world-wide.
Is human activity the primary cause, or even a strong contributing cause? Unclear. No one can produce anything really concrete on the subject, and there is still no so-called "consensus" among scientists world-wide concerning the subject.
Can we stop climate change? Again, it's unclear whether we can stop it. There may not be a way to stop the shift.
Should we try to stop climate change? That's a difficult question to answer without any firm idea on what to do, how much of it to do, and when to do it. What if the climate change is something that the earth needs to happen to it to stay healthy? What if this is something that happens every once in a while irrespective of human activity? What if we try to "fix" global warming and totally screw up the entire ecosphere?
It's unreasonable to expect change not to come. People get older and die. Trees die, and not just because of climate change. Did you know that the American chestnut tree, which dominated the eastern American landscape from the time before the first European settlers, was nearly wiped out in the first part of the 20th century by a fungus? You can read about it at
this website, among other sites.
The story about trees dying due to global warming is only partially factual. It assumes that man-made global warming is a fact, and therefore implicitly accuses the reader of complicity in the murder of all those magnificent and stately trees. Aren't we terrible?
But we have to remember the lesson of Yellowstone National Park. For decades, the Forest Service protected the forest from fire. And when fires finally came in 1988, they were so intense that they killed the soil in some places. New growth is coming in (see
this site), but not as quickly as wild forests where fires are not kept away from the forest for such a long time and therefore aren't as intense. Just because we can do something to Mother Nature, it doesn't mean we should do it. She gets cranky sometimes.
My other point is that we don't know nearly what we think we know. And a lot of what we know is wrong. Before Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, most scientists believed that something called "ether" or "aether" occupied the space between the planets. Whole systems of thought were built around the concept. Famous physicists tried to measure the aether's effect on light (check out
this site or Google Michelson-Morley) and failed, and then went on to build even more elaborate explanations for their failure - because the aether really was there, you see.
Of course, there is no aether in space. So something that everybody knew about space in 1880 was totally wrong. What will we feel stupid about believing today when we learn something new tomorrow? Scientists once believed that atoms could not be split. Then we learned that they were made up of even smaller particles, which were then the smallest things in existence. Then we learned that there were even smaller things in the microverse which make electrons look immense by comparison. I don't doubt that the CERN accelerator will teach us lots of new things in the next decade or so.
Man-made global warming doesn't fall into the "believed whole-heartedly but totally false" category, but neither does it fall into the "fact" slot. I hope we can all be reasonable about such discussions and not adopt dogmatic positions which do not invite reasoned discourse.
