The Issue of Climate Change and its Impact

Is our climate warming and is it cause for alarm?

There is considerable debate right now about climate change. The debate is not really a major one about the truth of its occurrence but rather about the funding of its solutions. For example, certain political regions are opting for a carbon capture tax while others are not, thereby giving the economic benefit to those who do not. This being the case, the taxpayers of those be hit by the carbon capture taxes are organizing to vote out their political leaders pursuing environmental incentives. So it is also for those regions where coal or oil are major components in their revenue base. With the shutdown of refining, drilling or mining, for the sake of reducing CO2 emissions, comes the additional political hot potato of lost jobs and further revenue loss. Unemployment and declining revenues are the fastest way to see political upsets occur. 

The common man and woman does not understand climate change and, as it turns out, the climatologist and scientist may not either. There are many factors that determine our climate. Six known classic factors are latitude, ocean currents, wind and air masses, elevation, relief precipitation (caused by mountainous terrains), the moderating effect of being near water (oceans or lakes). Beyond this, though, there are many unknowables. 

We may say with confidence that our earth is a very forgiving planet that seems to have stayed the course of inhabitability for a very long time without our complete understanding of how it has done so. Just like our universe, our planet has had a harmonious existence allowing for major catastrophic events like natural disasters and evidence of dramatic geological upheavals in the past.

The role of humankind in our survival of the planet is a dubious one. Humans have only begun to affect our planet in the last 150 years or so. The building of the Panama Canal was a major accomplishment in shortening shipping times from the Pacific coast of North America to Europe. The building of massive locks connecting the America-Canadian midwest to the Atlantic through the Great Lakes brought undesirable mussels and other saltwater life forms into the interior of the continent. By extrapolation, it is thought we have done the same to affect our weather.  The common world view is that humans are just one more species that has evolved and now determine the survival of our planet because of our ability to endanger its climate. Climate, remember, is long-term weather.



The consensus view on climate change is that it is happening. The view that it is caused by anthropogenic causes (human activity) is also a majority view but by no means a consensus. Even less certain is the eventual impact of any climate change that may be occurring. The fact that French winemakers have purchased land in southern England to grow some of their heirloom grapes for wine may be seen as a positive development--especially for the British! The possibioity that certain colder regions of our planet may become warmer and therefore more arable and liveable may also be seen as a positive development if it comes to pass. But the threat of alarming ocean levels flooding coastal regions of already densely populated cities is certain a concern. The suggestion that natural disasters may increase in frequency because of global warming is also bad news if it is true.

But then, there's the kicker: Just what is factual about climate change and are there factors the public doesn't know about that they should? Is there information climate scientists are ignoring? And how reliable are their computer models that rely so heavily on? Is there truly a correlation between temperature increases and CO2 emission increases? Add to this a highly politicized rhetoric and you have a very uncertain opinion about any of the science behind the issue. Would you want to be forced out of work and have your mine, oil field, or refinery closed down for the sake of the environment? 

There is a vast spectrum of opinions on climate change. Very few are left who outright deny climate change. But, from there on in, there is a myriad of skeptics, agnostics, and qualifiers.

Let us get a clear picture, if we can. Historically, anyone can verify that the planet's climate has always changed and sometimes quite dramatically. A Roman historian in the second century wrote that the climate had changed so much that olives were now growing in Greece!  This would indicate that it must have been much cooler prior to his writing because olives right now are quite commonly found in Greece. Testimonial evidence, therefore, of climate change. In 1943, six American P-38's were crashed in a bad snowstorm on Greenland and only excavated later in 1988 to be found un 270 feet of ice! At an accumulation rate of over 5 feet per year and a suggested maximum Greenland glacier thickness of some 5000 feet, this would indicate that Greenland was truly green only a thousand years ago!  Likewise, the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, by the Viking around the same time and their reference to it as Vinland, would indicate that grapes were capable of being grown there when they can no longer be found.  Recently a Viking Cape Dorset settlement on Baffin Island led the archeologist from Memorial University to state that "all the eivdence shows this settlement to be as populated and busy as any town in Europe". Of course, the settlement is quite barren now in its Arctic environment. All of this seems to confirm that the earth's climate has changed quite dramtically since even medieval times (when the Viking were active in the northern arctic). 

What followed this Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was what we now know as the LIttle Ice Age (LIA)  from 1400 to 1850 when the evidence shows that the climate was unusually cooler than we associate with these areas now. And this evidence was not just testimonial but now commited to art. Artists painted people skating on the Thames River in England and it has never frozen over in recent times. So did Dutch and Flemish artists. So cold was it in the north of Europe that accounts record Polar Bears being seen on the Orkney Islands of Scotland. All of this evidence and more confirms that certainly Europe and part of Asia underwent some dramatic cooling phase in the climate until about 1850.

Along this vein, a recently retired professor of astrophysics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), David Lindzen has produced powerful evidence to show that, indeed, the weather has always been warming since the Little Ice Age, but not alarmingly so. And his papers suggest it will continue to do so, yet without danger to human activity. This lack of sensationalism did not endear Lindzen to his critics and a Norwegian scientist fell into his same camp with the latest IPCC report, refusing to sign it, because (so he told BBC) of its warning that global warming threatened human adaptation. The Norwegian climate scientist refuse to sign it because, already, he opined, humans have shown themselves to the warmest and coldest climates existing today on earth. Yet another scientist interviewed after him on the BBC, shot out the accusation that this Norwegian scientist was only expressing his doubts as a "publicity stunt". So much for real science and real inquiry.

The waters have been roiled too by some logistical changes that can make an honest broker question the data being collected. Many CRU's (Climate Research Units or stations) were relocated in the 1980's to a closer proximity to urban areas for the sake of convenience. But, with urban relocation, would necessarily come closer proximty to heat-attracting pavements and roads, too. So would the reading still be valid?

Then came the publication of studies that show a close correlation with sunspot activity and climate data. Apparently there are cycles of these and that our weather is warmed or cooled by their presence and intensity or their absence or decline. Dr. Ivan Semineuk ov McGill Unviersity presented on Canada's Discovery science show. It has been confirmed with a documentary on BBC by teams of scientist in Britain. 

Few people realize some of the science around climate change too. The largest greenhouse gas is not CO2 but rather water vapour!  Are we to control this natural part of the hydrology cycle? The threat of bio-engineering, by the way, is truly one possibility that should scare everyone: Scientists shooting gigantic mirrors up into space to reflect sun's heat from the earth, or cloud-seeding to control climate change. Both of these I have seen on television documentaries. Thankfully, the willingness to try these innovations are as rare as medical researcher willing to try an AIDS vaccine!

So bad has the publicity over CO2 become, that the public has largely forgotten that CO2 is a GOOD GAS that is needed for both photosynthesis and transpiration! Trees need it and we need their oxygen produced by it. Ironically, no one worries about nitrogen which is poisonous to humans in its pure form but harmless as 78% of the air we breathe!

This year, certain heat records are being attributed to climate change with the footnote that it is also caused by the "Super" El Nino climate phenomenon. So is there really any long-term global warming cause behind the record temperatures all? Famous scientist, Freeman Dyson, is one of the holdouts about climate change who regularly expresses his doubts about our understanding of it on the basis of the role cloud creation plays in mitgating the harmful attempts of climate. And there have been many scandals such as Glaciergate and Climategate that reveal some serious fuding of the facts and sensationalizing of the effects of climate change as we understand it currently. Sometimes, exaggerations carry the arguments. The Arctic sea ice thickness has only been recorded since the late 1970's and therefore lack any long-term data. Research papers from Germany show that sea-ice thickness has always teeter-tottered between the Arctic and the Antarctic over the decades. When the Arctic ice is thickening the Antarctic sea-ice thins and vice versa. The navigability of the Northwest Passoge has been used to justify the climate change argument ignoring the fact the the Northwest passoge was navigable in the 1940's when the RCMP boat, the St. Roch, passed through it from Vancouver to Halifax in 86 days--and later returned as well. 

Lord Neville Lawson of Britain was interviewed on CBC and expressed his opinion that the rise of the climate change movement was a direct offspring of the environmental movement and the decline of conventional religion. He saw the issue a back-to-the-earth Gaeia nature worship movement. A little extreme, perhaps, but something to muse upon.

Whether our taxes should be climbing on the part of our attempts to curb climate change is therefore very questionable. Judith Currie, an enivronmentalist and questioner of climate change, was interviewed in Scientific American and complained about the "tribalism" infecting the scientific community over climate change. No doubt there is good science being done in trying to understand our environment but an even larger truth has also been forgotten: That the inconclusiveness about climate change and its impact does not negate the truth that we are badly continuing to pollute the land, air and sea of our planet.