What's wrong with this picture

The AP caption says it's an undated photo showing a glaciologist and a botanist "examining deposits of ancient alpaca moss recently exposed by the retreat of the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes."

"Rapidly melting glaciers in the Andes in Peru have uncovered moss and grasses that have been covered by ice since they first grew about 6,500 years ago, said the Ohio State researcher who has predicted global warming will erase mountain ice caps that are a valued water source for many communities around the world."

That would be a catastrophe. And no doubt that prediction will twist the cranks of climate-change cassandras.

But think about it (like the AP didn't). That hunk of moss was growing there 6,500 years ago. That's about 6,490 years before the first SUV. Climate then in that place was warmer than it is now (no moss grows there today).

That doesn't mean we can stop thinking about the role of man-made factors in the Earth's shifting climate.

It means we can start thinking about them. Without the passion and the politics. Yes, the world seems to be getting warmer in recent decades. What does that mean? Is human activity the only reason? What if it turns out that CO2 pollution from cars is heating up the planet, but that, say, farming is heating it up ten times more? What if deep ocean currents are shifting for no man-made reason, and actually turning the northern hemisphere back to another ice age, but human pollution is counterbalancing that?

What we need is some serious scientific work, not a lot of pseudo-religion. It's a common complaint of the secular left that their opponents put dogma above science. But the underlying fallacy of much of the climate-change alarmist rhetoric is that it is the left's equivalent of creationism. It presumes a steady, stable world ecology humming along for millenia in perfect balance like a Swiss watch, until evil Anglo-American corporations come along and destroy it.

Go thumb through a paleoclimatology textbook (or find something like one online). Look at the charts and graphs. Not a straight line among them. They go up and down like a toilet seat in a rock concert Port-a-John.



Here's one that a climate-change alarmist will love. This is the average global temperature of the last 2,000 years, as plotted from a range of indicators across the globe. Look at 2004! Runaway global warming for sure.

Or not. You have to read the fine print to know that the lines across the graph are "best-fit" projections, up to 2004, which is the only year that stands alone and isn't "smoothed down" into the graph. The range of hot years in the Middle Ages, for instance, is much more dramatic than the graph indicates.



Now take 100 steps back. In this graph, the time flows the other way: the far right is the oldest part of the graph. In fact, over on that end you can see the temperature rising up out of the depths of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. The "climate optimum" of about 4,000 to 8,000 years ago corresponds to the moss under the Quelccaya ice caps. The whole of the previous graphic (reversed) is contained in the thumbnail of space between 0 and 2.



Here's a still longer view. (Time flows the other way again, as in the first graph). The whole of the second graphic is squeezed into the far right end of this one. Here you can see the whole range of the Ice Ages, and even a little bit of the much warmer earth that existed on the far side of them, about 125,000 years ago.

So it looks like we live in one of the warmest ages in global history, right? Now step all the way back.



This very rough graph plots the likely temperature through geological time (the present is on the left again) since about the time life first was recorded on earth. Looks like we're in one of the chilliest epochs of world history.

Why were there Ice Ages after millions of years without them? Why were there dramatic warm spikes in the middle of them? Nobody knows. No good scientific model of world climate change yet has been constructed.

That's a scary thought, frankly. No wonder it's so much easier to approach the topic as pure politics.

BBC, for instance, recently took a spin through some of the conclusion-jumping done in the liberal European press in the wake of the recent hurricanes, including The Independent's screaming front-page headline "This is global warming" above an "alarmingly portentous graphic of Hurricane Rita's projected path."

Ross Gelbspan's book "Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—And What We Can Do to Avert the Disaster" gets a critical notice in Reason. The book seems to be no worse than many others I've seen (my eco-minded brother has a habit of giving me such books as holiday gifts).

Gelbspan ... fails to explain that the “greenhouse skeptics” he cites — those “criminals against humanity” — accept that the industrial emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has contributed to a warming trend during the last century. What remains at issue is the extent of this contribution and the magnitude of warming that can be expected during the next century. Computer simulations of uncertain reliability indicate that by 2100 the globally averaged surface temperature will rise approximately 2.5 degrees Celsius, which would seem to require a wholesale switch to nuclear power in the next few decades to avoid the devastation of energy poverty. But other lines of evidence suggest a change of 1 degree or less, which would be comparable to past natural change, making the transition to 21st-century energy technologies much more affordable. Boiling Point obscures this ongoing debate by repeatedly appealing to a nonexistent scientific consensus.

And, predictably from the subtitle, the book's premise is that this destructive evil is allowed to continue because there's so much money to be made at it. Interesting notion: sell a lot of books by promoting a political positions about how much money there is to be made promoting the opposing position.

Gelbspan portrays dissent from his view of climate change as evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s corrupting influence, which apparently extends to scientists, journalists, the current administration, even labor union leaders and environmental activists. Yet Boiling Point does not consider the financial, ideological, and personal interests that favor alarmism, such as the desire by scientists for more research funding; by activists for more donations, media attention, and political relevance; by journalists for better play and bigger book advances.

Sallie Baliunas, the reviewer, makes what ought to be an obvious point here: "The existence of nonscientific motives does not tell us which side is right; only careful consideration of the evidence can do that."

And she goes on to note that, while hot air is being wasted on insults and conspiracies that presume the scientific question is fully settled, the science is just beginning to grapple with the very complex problem of climate change.

While Boiling Point alludes to scientific uncertainties concerning the “role of clouds, future rates of warming, and specific impact in particular geographic areas, to name a few [issues],” Gelbspan immediately redirects focus by declaring that “the overwhelming predominance of climate research today focuses on the [ecosystem] impacts of warming.” If so, climate research has misplaced priorities. In fact, however, many researchers refuse to skip the hard work of achieving a scientifically sound understanding of climate change, a requisite for accurately estimating its impact.

Climate is a complex, dynamic system that involves the oceans, the atmosphere, biota, ice, and land, which interact with each other in multifaceted ways. An accurate computer simulation of climate does not yet exist. Quantitative impacts of natural and anthropogenic influences, of which the enhanced greenhouse effect is one, are works in progress.

I want to know the real answers, rather than leaping to the conclusion, precisely because I love some places -- Venice and the Florida Keys, for instance -- that are seriously at risk under climate change models.