Climate Change

On climate change and the role of human agency in it, the only people I'm really interested in hearing from are the paleoclimatologists, especially those who study the most recent period of geological history. It seems to me more worthwhile to look at what they know and think about it than what some politician or industry-funded think-tank says.

Here's the domestic organization for that set of earth scientists. They seem to take the problem seriously and regard the man-made element as real and alarming. At the same time, if you read their abstracts and papers on what has gone on in the last 2 million years or so, you see how much climate changes even without us, and how little we know about why.

Besides, they're actually more interesting than Al Gore. You can read about the "53rd Midwest Friends of the Pleistocene Field Conference" -- I want to party with those guys -- and the furious debate over the "status of the Quaternary" and the overall way scientists should break up the periods of recent geological time:

Under this compromise, the Gelasian, which is currently the uppermost stage of the Pliocene Epoch, would be transferred to the Quaternary. The Quaternary Period would follow the Neogene Period, which along with the Paleogene, would replace the Tertiary as periods and systems. The proposal thus would establish three periods in the Cenozoic – Paleogene, Neogene, and Quaternary. The Tertiary would continue to be used, but as an informal unit.

As the site warns, the saga "comes dangerously close to becoming a soap opera" at times. And you thought the de-listing of Pluto was a big deal.

True Believers

An Al Gore True Believer said this to me yesterday: "I'm not the problem. Society is the problem." This person sells real estate and drives a big Mercedes all day long in his job in our Connecticut exurbia.

A lovely anecdote, courtesy of Maggie's Farm, which also lists things you will do if you sincerely "believe in a man-made global warming crisis:"

Will not fly on airplanes
Will live close enough to work to walk or bike
Will turn off your electric power - and no oil lamps. No computers - they are energy sponges.
Will cease to mow your lawn
Will heat your home with solar power, or, better yet, not at all. It takes a lot of energy to create those solar panels
Will give up eating beef
Will junk your cars, tractors, lawn-mowers, boats, chain saws, etc.
Will wear no synthetics, or clothing requiring electric power to produce
Will grow all of your own food so it doesn't have to be trucked to your supermarket

Which is probably meant to be provocative, but it also happens to be a serious list. Like any good egoist, I checked myself against it and came out pretty far on the "green" side, but not necessarily for green reasons (I don't fly more than once every 4 or 5 years because I can't stand being sardined into coach class and I can't afford business class).

Really, a lot of these can be accomplished by the simple tactic of living in a small, older city without an extensive suburb. I work six blocks from my home (#2), mow my tiny lawn with an old-fashioned push-mower (#4), can keep the heat down because the buildings are close to each other and tree-shaded, which moderates the weather (#5, partially), and buy most of our groceries at a local farmer's market from the people who grow them, or are one step removed from the local producers.

And all that greenliness from a fascist centerpiece of the right-wing warmonger America-destroying wingnutosphere.

Back to Maggie's:

If you do not do those things, then I won't believe that you are genuinely concerned, and will not take you seriously. Show me what to do - don't tell me what to do. Government and the UN first, please. Greenies second.

Just don't tell me that you are going to continue to enjoy these luxuries until the government forces you not to. Show leadership and individual responsibility. No pseudo-virtuous tokenism, please.

There are two things to be kept separate here: One is the reality of the condition of the climate, so far as we can determine it, and the role of human activity in whatever ways it is trending (and that itself is three different things).

The other is the political and psychological quirks that surge to the surface of some people as they react to that situation. And those are potentially as dangerous to the balancing Earth as capitalism or whatever the bogey man du jour is.

A psychological need to punish Western and American prosperity in the name of saving the planet will drive you to downplay the effect of pollution and resource extraction from emerging economies in the non-Western world. Which figure to be serious contributors to the problem in the short-term, and in some cases already are.

Do you love the Earth more than you resent Bu$hco? Do you want to give your grandchildren a cleaner world more than you need to validate your own anger by protesting and picketing?

To be serious about it, you have to confront the climatological models, and you have to cut through the psychological fallacies as rationally and calmly as possible. Probably not one in 100 of the people most loudly participating in this debate is doing that.

Earth Day

[posted by Callimachus]

In the Florida Keys, a place I love, you appreciate the fragility of nature and the vulnerability of the world we know. The land there is practically flat, and if you turn left or right, you see open water. Any rise in sea level would devastate the place.



But if you understand how to read the land there, you know you're standing on the fossil of a dead coral reef. Sometimes, as above, in a road cut in Key Largo, you can see whole huge coral skeletons still standing in place. Only 120,000 [corrected] or so years ago, this was a thriving undersea oasis. Then the sea level dropped as the climate cooled and the ice advanced, and this precious ecosystem died a terrible desiccating death. Everything in the middle Keys, from the restaurant parking lot gravel to the 1935 Hurricane memorial in Islamorada, is built from the rubble of an ecological catastrophe.



The earth is delicate, but it endures. Nature is cruel, but man is part of nature. Man is not the only destructive force on the planet.



I saw a photo like the one above on the AP news wire a couple years back (sorry; I can't find the original anymore), 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 that prediction continues to 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 and lawnmowers 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? [In the 1991 science fiction novel "Fallen Angels," environmentalists have taken over earth's governments and imposed luddite laws, which end global warming, only to unleash a new ice age, which had been held in check, we learn too late, by global warming caused by human pollution. Fiction, but at least within the realm of possibility.]

Go ahead and monkey with the world's economies to reduce carbon emissions, but realize that a single major (unpredictable) volcanic eruption could crank back the global thermostat 5 degrees or more overnight. As happened in 1783 or 1816. Make it a more serious eruption -- like an acne rash of volcanoes, but within the realm of the possible -- and you literally could wipe out all life on earth.

Long before climate change became a polemical pet of Al Gore, it was a matter of historical scholarship. Since I concentrated my college studies on northern Europe in the Middle Ages, I read years ago about droughts that drove the great horde migrations out of central Asia, the summer of rain that caused the famine of 1215 in England, and the punishing storms that re-drew the coastlines of Flanders, Holland and Friesland in the 12th century. All because of climate change.



The North Sea incursions were catastrophic on a Hollywood scale: sea surges punched through the dunes (you can see the relics of the old coast in the line of islands off the coast of Holland, Germany, and Denmark), killed perhaps 100,000 people, and turned vast agricultural districts into reed seas. In 1231, the sea flooded up river channels into the inland lake of Holland and by 1300 it had become a bay. In 1277, thirty villages in the lower Ems basin were drowned and the Dollart formed. In floods in 1240 and 1362, sixty parishes in the diocese of Schleswig were drowned, amounting to half the agricultural land of the realm. The island of Heligoland was 60 kilometers across in C.E. 800; by 1325 it was only 25 kilometers in diameter at the widest, half the loss having come in a single storm in January of that year. Today it is only 1.5 kilometers at the widest. The English ports of Ravenspur and Dunwich drowned about the same time.

And all that was before the internal combustion engine, the Frigidaire, the Industrial Revolution. The Earth's climate changes over time. The change can be catastrophic. Some scientists and some historians always have been aware of this, but most people aren't, because the temperatures in the last 500 years have been relatively stable. The Europeans of the Middle Ages saw the last dramatic phase of warming and cooling, but even that was a blip compared to what can happen.

We still don't know what makes it change; probably a combination of processes including everything from volcanic eruptions to deep sea currents to, possibly, interstellar dust. What we know for sure is the Earth has been much warmer in its recent past, and much cooler. There's no guarantee on the climate you see around you.

We ought to pay more attention to this. The discussion we ought to be having about climate change would take into account both human agency and other, potentially much more serious, forces. Even if we know for sure we're having an impact on the climate, that doesn't answer the question of how that impact flows into the ongoing changes that will occur with or without us.

But instead, the debate has shrunk into a chirping contest between name-calling factions: "eco-freaks" and "tree-huggers" vs. "fossil fuelers" and "corporations."

I wish the people who expect me to join this religion would take the time to make it palatable to common sense and to admit that intelligent people of good will might not be convinced by their doomsday movies.

Explain, don't hector. And acknowledge for a change that the environment confronts us with complicated choices; we're hooked into an energy system that fuels a prosperity unrivaled in human history; that prosperity keeps poverty, disease, and starvation at bay. The seers of the 1960s predicted India and China would collapse into overpopulation chaos, and drag the world with them, but instead they have grown toward stability and even affluence, and their consumption of fossil fuel has grown dramatically at the same time. That's not a coincidence.

Yet to Peter Matthiessen, to quote one environmental zealot, the current energy system is nothing but a plot by the "hardened apostles of material progress," and a shadowy cabal of "fossil fuelers." Ross Gelbspan decries“greenhouse skeptics” as “criminals against humanity.”

Start the discussion by acknowledging that the Earth's climate fluctuates, and that's just nature's way. On the Alaskan North Slope, where Matthiessen frets about how much snow falls on the musk oxen, three-ton duck-billed dinosaurs once grazed in herds year-round on lush river-valley vegetation.

Go thumb through a paleoclimatology textbook (or find something like one online). Look at the charts and graphs.



Here's one that a climate-change alarmist will love. This is the average global temperature from 1860 to 2000. Runaway global warming for sure.



Now take 100 steps back. Over on the left 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 "Little Ice Age" happened in medieval times; it came on shortly after the series of storms that redrew the map of the Netherlands. The whole of the previous graph is contained in the pinhead of pixels at the far right edge of the graph.



Here's a still longer view. The second graphic is squeezed into the pink bar and what's beyond it at the far right end of this one. Here you can see the whole of the last Ice Age.

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. Time flows the other way in this one (sorry; I couldn't find a graph that was consistent with the others). The present is way over on the left here. The distant past is on the right. And it's distant indeed: about the time life first was recorded on earth. Looks like we're in one of the chilliest epochs of world history.

But it suits us. And any change in it -- toward the hot or the cold, by human agency or natural forces -- would be a disaster.

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.

Human beings right now have a lot invested in the stability of weather patterns and coastlines, and we all ought to pay attention to what can cause catastrophic climate changes. Better to investigate and learn and adopt, rather than shut down discussion in advance because you don't like the people who want to hijack the issue and pour their personal manias into it.

Environmentalists often share with creationists the utterly unscientific view that the world was set spinning in one complete, harmonious form. They presumes a steady, stable world ecology humming along for millennia in perfect balance like a Swiss watch, until evil Anglo-American corporations come along and destroy it. They write as though it all would continue in perfect ecological balance if only man would leave it alone. Like creationists, they view the human race as something non-natural, though in their case it seems to be sub-, not supra-, naturam, and its impact is entirely baleful.

What we need now is 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.

Climate Report

[posted by Callimachus]

AP apparently has got a copy of the big climate change report and it wants to tell me "The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is 'very likely' caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries ...."

But I'm frustrated that it doesn't seem to know enough climate to answer my main question. I already know all that. What I want to know -- and still don't -- is how much of the warming is caused by human industrial activity and how much by other forces and factors.

The world's climate has fluctuated all through its history. In Roman times, the Alpine glaciers disappeared entirely. A few thousand years earlier, the ice sheets had rolled over what is now Connecticut. Yet the AP seems to misunderstand the climate to be a steady, continuous, balanced thing that only the arrival of modern human activity has upset.

The scientist says:

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

Emphasis added. But the AP writes as though it's an either-or situation:

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

It should say "a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused at least in part by man's burning of fossil fuels." The bigger number I want to know is, "in what part?" And I still suspect that's unanswerable in scientific terms. I don't believe scientists know enough about the complex mix of natural forces that drive the climate even to say whether human agency is the primary cause of the current climate change.

To head off the inevitable charge of being a denialist, I think it is real, and I think it's a dire problem for everyone, no matter the cause. And that's why I'm concerned about the message fuzzing out amid bad reporting and sloppy political agendas.

An analogy: You know water is flooding your basement, and you know you're running your faucets upstairs with leaky pipes. So "very likely" there's a connection. But you can't see outside to know whether it's been raining for 40 days and nights, too.

[I notice, too, that the media is not averse to using the old, damned, sexist term mankind when it comes to things like pollution and industry, even though the AP's own style guide recommends "a substitute such as humanity ...."]

Human Nature

After having spent part of the weekend with my hardcore environmentalist brother, who showed us many digital slides of the hay bale houses he thinks we all should be living in, I've been thinking. About environment, politics, and boys who cry wolf.

He does good work, in "sustainable" living, land preservation, anti-sprawl efforts. He does a lot of teaching on the college level. He's big on educating people on these issues. Again, it's a useful thing to do in the world.

But when you talk to him, he has an earnestness about it that can be kind of scary. You have no trouble seeing him as one of those environmentalists who would say with a straight face the earth would be much better off if three-fourths of the people alive on it were dead. I've never actually asked him that. I sort of don't want to know.

His world-view, the unthinking part of it, seems based on a dichotomy of human = bad, nature = good. As though humans weren't part of nature. Like creationism turned on its head.

I don't know exactly what he studied for his graduate degree in all this, but my impression is of a lot of topic-specific courses, sociology and environmentalism as complete courses of study. Not much pure history. Not any geology that I can see.

We don't inhabit quite the same earth.

We both, for instance, see the vulnerability of the Chesapeake Bay, an hour south of here, where we've both canoed over the years. We've seen the disappearance of the oysters through pollution and overharvesting. We've seen the waters turn murky and algae-choked. We've read about the vulnerability of the bay to sea-level rises.

Hell, you don't even have to read about it; just stand there on the Eastern Shore and look around. There are no elevations. One of my favorite pictures I took down there shows a street sign: "Hilltop Road," on a landscape as flat as a pool table. Either the Watermen have a highly evolved sensitivity to elevation or a highly evolved sense of humor.

But I also see something my brother apparently doesn't see: The Chesapeake also is the corpse of a drowned river valley -- which once was a vulnerable ecosystem of its own. As recently as 6,000 years ago, seawater rushed in and flooded the landscape, erasing what was there before and replacing it with what we now treat as God's gift to oysters.

The same with another place I know well and love: The Florida Keys. When you stand on the Keys, you appreciate the fragility of nature, and the vulnerability of the world we know. The highest land elevation is barely higher than a two-story house. If you don't have mangroves around you, you can stand on any of the Keys and turn left or right and see open water. Hurricane storm surges can sweep them clean. Any rise in sea level would devastate them.

But if you understand the land there, you know you're standing on the fossil of a dead coral reef. Only 20,000 or so years ago, this was a thriving undersea oasis. Then the sea level fell as the climate cooled and the ice advanced, and the delicate ecosystem died a terrible death. Everything in the middle Keys, from the restaurant parking lot gravel to the 1935 Hurricane memorial in Islamodora, is built from the rubble of an ecological catastrophe.

The earth is delicate. Nature is the black sow that eats her farrow. Man is part of nature.

And the key to the boy-who-cried-wolf story is that there really was a wolf. My brother, for all his education and deep concern for these topics, is not going to be the right person to teach the rest of us about them. Nature will survive even the most dire forecasts of global warming. It has in the past.

Human beings would be able to survive it, too. By pulling inland, by abandoning the current coastlines, by shifting food production. But that would be an unimaginable catastrophe for the modern, industrialized world. With our land titles and coastal tourism and oil rigs -- yes, all the things my brother most despises about us and probably wishes we would lose anyhow are the things at risk.

It is the people with the most commitment to the world as it is -- not the idealists who long for a more pure world -- who ought to be most concerned about environmental change, who ought to be most invested in keeping the world in roughly its current shape, in spite of nature, not in worship of her.

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.

The Iceman Cometh

Ulrich Joerin, a Swiss scientist, does climatology without fear. Retreating glaciers supposedly are sure signs of global warming. But Joerin has assembled heavy evidence that Swiss glaciers have advanced and retreated dramatically over the last few thousand years. In fact, for much of that time, they were smaller than they are today, and about 7,000 years ago they all but disappeared.

He takes a journalist up to the edge of a glacier and says, "Back then we would have been standing in the middle of a forest." The proof is beneath his feet: he kicks up a blackened tree stump. It must have been carried down by the glacier. But that means the forest must have been there before the ice. He's collected hundreds of similar tree remains, and dated them carefully.

The fact that the Alpine glaciers are melting right now appears to be part of regular cycle in which snow and ice have been coming and going for thousands of years.

The glaciers, according to the new hypothesis, have shrunk down to almost nothing at least ten times since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. "At the time of the Roman Empire, for example, the glacier tongue was about 300 meters higher than today," says Joerin. Indeed, Hannibal probably never saw a single big chunk of ice when he was crossing the Alps with his army.

Aha! Or not. What does this have to do with global warming? Almost nothing, except that, if he is right, one of the supposedly obvious evidence for it may be no such thing.

Joerin is quick to explain that he is not trying to explain away the effects of man-made warming of the past few years: "Our findings so far could also be seen as giving the exact opposite of a climatic all-clear," he says. "If we can prove that there were ancient forests where the glaciers are today, it means one thing in particular: that the climate can change more suddenly than we thought."

Up on the Tschierva Glacier the two scientists are especially keen on finding the answers to the most pressing questions of the day: How quickly did the climate change? How quickly did the balance of ice slip from a plus into a minus and back again? The carbon dating method they've been using is far too imprecise for this, which is why the scientists plan to compare their results to the analysis of the carbon rings. For that they need more samples like TSC-160.

Joerin spots the ideal specimen. "Up there, that is a prime example," he says, pointing to a tree trunk in the ice, deep and unreachable. The scientists will have to return at another time, but they have already set a date. By October the glacier will have receded another 50 meters, freeing the tree trunk for the chainsaw and the microscope.

And that's the way science is supposed to work; dig the sodden tree stump out of the dirty ice, count the rings, report the results. If it adds to the theory, the theory gains. If it doesn't, go back to the drawing board. The only thing a scientific statement should do is fit the facts and be internally consistent. Politics don't have a place.

Zing

Students at Middlebury College evidently can take "a class on climate change and activism." I wonder if that's considered a "gut" course? At Dickinson in the '80s we had Astronomy 101 ("Stars for Studs;" I was a T.A.) and Geology 101 ("Rocks for Jocks"). Is this the environmental equivalent? "Stumps for Chumps?"

Well, if it is, the students just got more education than they bargained for. As part of the class, they designed a "Flat Earth Award" for global-warming naysayers. Gee, somehow I didn't think it required a $160,000 liberal arts education to do something like that. The winner was Dr. Fred Singer.

Singer did not shrivel up in horror when righteous youth shone its searing light of truth on him. He leaped up to accept the award. He even wrote an acceptance speech.

It reads, in part:

As you undoubtedly realize, there is no consensus within the scientific community about global warming. And even if there were such a consensus, this is not how science progresses.

Remember: There was once a consensus that the sun revolves about the earth, that humans could not travel faster than 25 m.p.h., that manned flight was technically impossible, and that rockets could not operate in the vacuum of space.

What matters are facts based on actual observations. And as long as weather satellites show that the atmosphere is not warming, I cannot put much faith into theoretical computer models that claim to represent the atmosphere but contradict what the atmosphere tells us. A computer model is only as good as the assumptions fed into it.

I hope that this does not come as too much of a shock for you. As for the claimed consensus - as published by Naomi Oreskes in the Dec. 3, 2004, issue of Science: A colleague of mine completed an audit of the material used by Professor Oreskes but did not duplicate her result. I expect that her paper will be withdrawn. You may want to drop the link to her article on your website.

He also points out that, contra Middlebury, he continues to publish in peer-reviewed journals, his work is not industry-funded, and he does not deny the principle of global warming. He says the greenhouse effect is real; he just says its effects are not as great as some other scientists say. "There is a discrepancy between what we expect from theory and the facts, and we need to explain that. That's what we're all working on."

All of which, I'm sure, is more education than the Middleburyites bargained for, even at $40,000 a year. But attempts to apply ivory tower dogmas to real-world situations, or enforce campus speech codes off-campus, often turn into teachable moments. Just remember what happened to Greenpeace protesters last year when they decided to storm London's International Petroleum Exchange and close down trading for the day. The Greenpeace team ran onto the trading floor, according to the London Times, "blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach."

But London traders seem to be young, tough, and have a soccer fan streak, and they don't suffer such foolishness lightly. They set upon the trespassers at once and "literally kicked them on to the pavement." One of the Greenpeacers complained, "I've never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view."

One trader, as his mates tossed a protester bodily out of the building and onto the sidewalk, dismissed him with the immortal phrase, "Sod off, Swampy!"

Fisking Christmas

Can you fisk a Christmas gift? How low is that? That low, huh? OK, here goes.

My brother gives people gifts he thinks they need. I'm not talking about, "you need a vacation; here's two tickets to Paris." It's more like, "you need to get more exposure to culture; here's two tickets to 'Waiting for Godot' at the theater where my downstairs neighbor works."

This year, I got a book of photographs of the Alaskan North Slope.

It is a beautiful book. Here's a picture of moose feeding on a willow patch in a certain river valley. Then I read the caption: Moose were not seen here before the 1940s. "Scientists say that one of the visible signs of climate change impacts due to global warming is that treelines, especially willow and dwarf birch, are moving north at a rapid pace ...."

Sigh. It's not really a book about Alaska after all. Apparently I'm not sufficiently alert about global warming.

But, elsewhere, "Windblown ridges with exposed vegetation, combined with dwarf willows, provide food during harsh winter months for a wide variety of wildlife." OK, so are the dwarf willows a good thing or a bad thing? Muskox herds eat them. Muskox herds are in danger, because, "During the past several years, the coastal plain experienced deeper snow and a later spring thaw than usual, a phenomenon scientists believe is the result of the impact of climate change due to global warming."

So that's bad, because they can't get the dwarf willows, right? But the dwarf willows aren't supposed to be there. But if it's global warming, why is it colder and snowier in Alaska than it used to be?

Yeah, I know, "global warming" is a misnomer -- greenhouse gas emissions piling up in the atmosphere means some parts of the world actually will get colder. Weather overall will be more erratic, more intense. But I wish the people who expect me to join this religion would take the time to make it palatable to common sense. Explain, don't hector.

And acknowledge for a change that the environment confronts us with complicated choices; we're hooked into an energy system that fuels a prosperity unrivaled in human history; that prosperity keeps poverty, disease, and starvation at bay. The seers of the 1960s predicted India and China would collapse into overpopulation chaos, and drag the world with them, but instead they have grown toward stability and even affluence, and their consumption of fossil fuel has grown dramatically at the same time. That's not a coincidence.

Yet to Peter Matthiessen, who pens a large text section of my book, the current energy system is nothing but a plot by the "hardened apostles of material progress," and a shadowy cabal of "fossil fuelers." The George W. Bush administration is "plainly more concerned with large tax cuts and subsidies for the large corporations than with the long-term interests of the nation." The plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge passed the House "in the climate of terrorist scare talk and 'patriotic' bullying after 9/11 ...."

It seems to me there's more than a slight connection between U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the grievances of bin Laden. That there might be a bit of -- dare I say it -- nuance to this sequence of events. But if there is, it slipped past Matthiessen. Al Qaida is just a hand puppet Bush uses to scare Congress. While the president was finishing up the last page of "My Pet Goat," apparently, his fossil fueler brain was thinking, "Oh, boy, now I can go befoul the Arctic!"

Nuclear power as an alternative? Nope, he's against that, too. Matthiessen's only glance at an alternative is "renewable clean energy from wind and sun," "the bright and boundless energy of sun and wind." Great! Let's run the economy of China on breezes and sunbeams.

Long before climate change became a pet cause of Al Gore, it was a matter of historical scholarship. Since I concentrated my college studies on northern Europe in the Middle Ages, I read years ago about droughts that drove the great hoarde migrations out of central Asia, the summer of rain that caused the famine of 1215 in England, and the punishing storms that re-drew the coastlines of Flanders, Holland and Friesland in the 12th century. All because of climate change.

The North Sea incursions were catastrophic on a Hollywood scale: sea surges punched through the dunes (you can see the relics of the old coast in the line of islands off the coast of Holland, Germany, and Denmark), killed perhaps 100,000 people, and turned vast agricultural disticts into reed seas. In 1231, the sea flooded up river channels into the inland lake of Holland and by 1300 it had become a bay. In 1277, thirty villages in the lower Ems basin were drowned and the Dollart formed. In floods in 1240 and 1362, sixty parishes in the dioscese of Schleswig were drowned, amounting to half the agricultural land of the realm. The island of Heligoland was 60 kilometers across in C.E. 800; by 1325 it was only 25 kilometers in diameter at the widest, half the loss having come in a single storm in January of that year. Today it is only 1.5 kilometers at the widest. The English ports of Ravenspur and Dunwich drowned about the same time.

And all that was before the internal combustion engine, the Frigidaire, the Industrial Revolution. The Earth's climate changes over time. The change can be catastrophic. Some scientists and some historians always have been aware of this, but most people aren't, because the temperatures in the last 500 years have been relatively stable. The Europeans of the Middle Ages saw the last dramatic phase of warming and cooling, but even that was a blip compared to what can happen.

We still don't know what makes it change; probably a combination of processes including everything from volcanic eruptions to deep sea currents to, possibly, interstellar dust. What we know for sure is the Earth has been much warmer in its recent past, and much cooler. There's no guarantee on the climate you see around you.

We ought to pay more attention to this. The discussion we ought to be having about climate change would take into account both human agency and other, potentially much more serious, forces.

Even if we know for sure we're having an impact on the climate, that doesn't answer the question of how that impact flows into the ongoing changes that will occur with or without us. In the 1991 science fiction novel "Fallen Angels," environmentalists have taken over earth's governments and imposed luddite laws, which end global warming, only to unleash a new ice age, which had been held in check, we learn too late, by global warming caused by human pollution. Fiction, but at least within the realm of possibility.

But instead, the debate has shrunk into a chirping contest between name-calling factions: "eco-freaks" and "tree-huggers" vs. "fossil fuelers" and "corporations."

Environmentalists often share with creationists the utterly unscientific view that the world was set spinning in one complete, harmonious form. They write as though it all would continue in perfect ecological balance if only man would leave it alone. Like creationists, they view the human race as something non-natural, though in their case it seems to be sub-, not supra-, naturam, and its impact is entirely baleful.

Start the discussion by acknowledging that the Earth's climate fluctuates, and that's just nature's way. On the Alaskan North Slope, where Matthiessen frets about how much snow falls on the dwarf willows, three-ton duck-billed dinosaurs once grazed in herds year-round on lush river-valley vegetation.

But human beings right now have a lot invested in the stability of weather patterns and coastlines, and we all ought to pay attention to what can cause catastrophic climate changes. Better to investigate and learn and adopt, rather than shut it down in advance because you don't like the people who want to hijack the issue and pour their personal manias into it.