More Junk Science from Keith Olbermann. I have mentioned that I hate when liberals are wrong. I especially hate when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who is a great champion of liberal causes, is wrong. But he IS wrong, repeatedly, on the whole issue of "man-made global warming", a passion of Group-Think Pop Science. Olbermann, like so many people in media, has the timeframe of the journalist: today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Ten years ago is an eternity; 30,000 years or a million years is a span beyond anyone's real comprehension, so is irrelevant. But it's not.
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"Geologic time" is what we need to bear in mind when we talk of "climate change". Not the past 50 years. Not even the past 300 years (which is longer than the entire Industrial Era). Geologic time suggests, hugely powerfully, that Earth's climate changes for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with that gnat — no, mite on the leg of the gnat — on the face of this planet, Man (and Woman).
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There was a "Little Ice Age" not so long ago. Indeed, it is so recent that we can't be sure we're even out of it yet, no matter what 'experts' say. The fact is, according to Wikipedia, that 'experts' cannot agree when the Little Ice Age began, but allow for dates as much as 400 years apart. Curiously, these same experts are, however, able to say that it ended in the middle of the 19th Century. Hm. It might have started at any point in a 400-year range, but ended abruptly, quickly, in about 1850? What if its end were as unclear as its beginning, and instead of 1850, it might still be receding, 150 years later, and might continue to recede for another 250 years (thus to equal the 400-year period of uncertainty as to its start)?
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Interestingly, there wasn't a single thermometer on the whole of planet Earth until at earliest 1611. So how the f*k do we claim to know, what temperatures were in the medieval period? It's all conjecture and interpolation from questionable measurements of glaciers and such, not direct observation at all. And tho "science" is infinitely arrogant about the rightness of its assertions of the day, the reality is that "science" (the collective body of people who call themselves "scientists" at any given moment) are wrong all the time. They don't make flat-out mistakes, of course, these superhumanly wise, all-knowing, all-powerful masters of the universe we dare not doubt. No, they merely 'adjust their projections'. There was one such adjusted projection this week, in which the rise in planetary ocean levels if the western Antarctic ice sheet were to melt was CUT BY HALF! And, curiously, these 'experts' claim that ocean levels would rise more in some places than others. My goodness! And I thought that water flowed to find a single level. The claim is made that some parts of the world will be more impacted by a rise of the oceans than others, and that the U.S. is among the areas potentially most affected:

However, they add, the maximum increase is expected along the East and West Coasts of the United States, where the water could rise as much as 25 percent more than in other regions.

How, pray, could that happen? Water famously finds its own, uniform, level. The two largest bodies of water on Earth, separated by an enormous land mass running 10,000 miles* between them, are remarkably uniform in height. The Pacific Ocean is only 20cm (8 inches) higher than the Atlantic. So we see, again, junk science, mob science, the "science" of the approved idea. Scientists are rewarded for toeing the line and mouthing the official line. Conversely, they are punished if they do NOT toe the line. They do not get funding. They don't even graduate from college unless they recite back what they have been told. The supposed protections of peer review don't work. For instance, the AOL News item about a recent change in the projected rise in sea levels IS NOT FOUND in a Google search of "ocean-level rise may 2009". Google is still finding the old projection, double the new. How are we to believe the Group Think of the "man-made global warming" crowd when climatologists can admit that, as regards ocean-level rise, they might have been off by 100%! What else might they be wrong about?
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Wikipedia says that the Little Ice Age was preceded by a warmer time known as the "Medieval Warm Period", running some 500 years, which was warmer than today! But experts don't all agree on either the MWP or the LIA. Astonishingly, however, all the experts seem to agree that the current warming is decidedly caused by human activity. The MWP wasn't. The LIA wasn't. But this one is.
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Paleoclimatologists also believe not only that there were catastrophic Ice Ages in this planet's past but that there were also periods in the long-prehistoric past in which there was no polar ice whatsoever (at least during summer) — none. This would have been tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years in the past. Interestingly, tho I have seen maps of the outlines of the continents, including an Asia-Alaska land bridge, during the last Ice Age, I have never, in my 64 and more years, seen a map of what the world might have looked like when there was no ice at the poles. Do we have any idea of that map? We know, supposedly, how low the seas went. Do we know anything at all about how high they went? Is the present coastline about the same as then? If not, how far inland did the oceans invade? Isn't this information NECESSARY to any intelligent discussion of whether we should be concerned about "man-made global warming"? And if it is, why don't we see such maps? A Google search on "map of earth when there was no polar ice" produces NOTHING useful.
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Ice Ages and periods when there was no polar ice at all managed to occur without any human intervention whatsoever, as did the MWP and LIA. But now, all of a sudden, everything is different, and everything that happens today is due to Man. No, dear simplistic believer in the infallibility of human "science", Man is NOTHING in planetary terms, nothing but an insignificant blite upon the most superficial layer of the planet's skin, with some pollution of the atmosphere. People are too tiny, too rare (occupying in quantity at most 12% of the planet's surface), to affect climate in ANY degree whatsoever, much less to cause calamitous "global warming".
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How insignificant is Man? On a 16-inch globe, the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai, at 2,824 feet (818 meters), over a half mile tall, could not be seen with a magnifying glass, nor, indeed, with anything less than a powerful microscope. On a 16-foot globe, Burj Dubai could barely be seen with the naked eye, for being less than 1/80th of an inch high. That is less than a capital-I in 1pt type! People are THAT insignificant.
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Nor, I repeat, do we REALLY know that there is any global warming whatsoever. Wikipedia says:

A radiocarbon-dated box core in the Sargasso Sea shows that the sea surface temperature was approximately 1̊C (1.8̊F) cooler than today approximately 400 years ago (the Little Ice Age) and 1700 years ago, and approximately 1̊C warmer than today 1000 years ago (the Medieval Warm Period).

Do I really need to say that there was no vast outpouring of "greenhouse gases" from human activity a THOUSAND YEARS AGO? But Earth is thought to have been WARMER when William the Conqueror invaded Britain than it is today. How is that possible if human activity regulates this planet's temperature? The concept of "man-made global warming" is RIDICULOUS.
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Keith Olbermann has recently introduced a "WTF" segment to his show, for "What The F*k?" Perhaps I need to introduce a GTFU segment to this blog, for "Grow The F*k Up". Man is NOTHING as regards climate. NOTHING. Nothing at all. GTFU, Mr. Olbermann. Stick to things you understand. Paleoclimatology is not among them. I love you passionately, politically. But GTFU climatologically.
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* It used to be that if you typed into Google a search term like "distance nome to tierra del fuego" or "length american continent nome to tierra del fuego", you would get results that told you that distance in miles or kilometers. No longer. Google isn't as good as it used to be, and people should say this openly, to force Google to fix the problems that have developed due to its changes in "algorithms" or whatever it is that has made Google increasingly USELESS. I have been reduced to guessing that if the circumference of the Earth is some 25,000 miles, the American landmass (or continent, if you, as I, conceive of the Americas as a single continent) is the largest part of half that distance, or about 10,000 miles between Atlantic and Pacific.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,296 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:52 AM