When did THIS happen?!

By Joseph Walther

I retired several years ago. Even though I’m having the time of my life, I make sure that I stay on top of things scientific. I have friends, my age and even older, who haven’t retired and they still do science for a living—real, genuine, objective science! Some of them are still with NASA.

I bring this to your attention for a reason. During this past week, ALONE, I’ve heard more talk about the weather than I’ve heard over the past ten years. It’s October 28^th, and we are just getting to some fall-like temperatures, mild though they’ve been. “Are we going to have fall this year?” is one of the most common questions I’ve heard.

The local TV weather people remind us, nightly, that this past October has been the warmest in history. As I think about it, the entire year, to date, has been one with some notable weather extremes, especially as they apply to hot weather. And, this past year has NOT been the hottest one on record.

These friends of mine that I referred to above work at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. We’ve talked! Here’s what they’ve told me.

The year 2005 was the hottest one on record. Not only was it the hottest, it was the driest. Its weather patterns produced twenty-six tropical storms in the warm waters of the Caribbean, more than ever before. Three of them became Category 5 hurricanes.

The ice cap at the North Pole is melting at a speed best described as “nearly exponential. The Amazon—home of a 1.2-billion acre rainforest—has been in the throes of a drought, the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Something is going on! Even the staunchest deniers of global warming, the ones with the opaque blinders, have to see the evidence. And, even though climatology is not my long coat, I do have a couple of short jackets hanging in my closet.

Climatologists love to dig in the ice, especially that thick ice in Greenland and Antarctica. They like it because they can dig WAY down… you know, like hundreds and hundreds of feet. There’s something unique about the ice that far down.

It’s very old ice down there. It dates back as far as 700,000 or so years. Not only this, it contains lots of atmospheric gas bubbles that give us a pragmatic, cross-sectional analytic view of our planet’s climate history. Wow! Guess what they found.

Samples of the ice bubbles studied, representing eons of time, revealed that the levels of carbon dioxide—a primary “greenhouse gas”—is NOW 27 percent higher than at any other time in Earth’s history, at least as it applies to the past 700,000 years.

Keep in mind that the planet experienced several abrupt and dramatic temperature shifts during the same period, when glaciers appeared and melted in a cosmic blink of an eye. Still, the current increase in carbon dioxide is even higher, dramatically higher.

Humans have influenced the condition. While there is some excess, I’m not going to blame it all on the human race. The world population has increased dramatically over those 700,000 years. There are over 6-billion of us today. As such, we’ve got to expect an increased amount of carbon dioxide, for God’s sake.

I’ve written about it before and I’ll repeat it here. I estimate that about half of the increase in carbon dioxide emissions has been unavoidable. There are MANY more of us nowadays. And, we’ve become rather used to many things that provide us with an acceptable degree of comfort and security.

So, what we could give up, even though modest, won’t put a dent in global warming. It would have the same scientific effect as offering human sacrifices to appease the gods.

In view of this recent revelation, we can look forward to temperature increases of between 5-and 10 percent over the rest of this century. In order to avoid it, we’d have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50- to 60 percent.

There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of this happening. So, while it’s not going to have a tremendous affect on people my age, you youngsters, especially those yet to be born, had better just sit back and brace yourselves for a rough ride.

I think that the fact that we exist at all is astonishing. If we break down a human being into chemical equivalents, we find that we are made of the same stuff as the stars in the universe. But, we’re not LIKE the stars. Nature configured us to a degree of complexity that makes it possible for us to THINK. Stars can’t do this.

Consciousness arose on this, the “third rock from the sun.” As far as we know for sure, it’s the only place that it’s happened. Some, about 74% of us, believe that God caused it. Still, others credit the powerful tautology of evolution—what “survives, survives.” But, if we’re honest with ourselves, no one knows for sure.

Science has told us a lot. Science has become an authority figure, especially in the eyes of many scientists. Keep in mind, however, that scientific discovery is based on the idea that we’re privy to an infinitesimally small fraction of the universe and everything it contains.

At its best, science can only tell us what’s actually there, based on years, decades, and centuries of hypotheses tests. Sometimes even then, what we learn is based on some small degree of assumption.

Delusion and naïveté, conversely, are the forces that tell us the things that we’d LIKE to be out there. Often, though, we base this “knowledge” on HUGE leaps of faith. Understand, however, that it doesn’t mean such things are untrue. It just means that healthy skepticism justifies seeking verifiable proof.

As wishfully as we sometimes like to think about many of these “truths,” it doesn’t make them facts. We’d do well to remember that no matter how strong a martyr’s conviction in a cause, it reveals only the martyr’s belief in the cause, not the veracity of the cause itself.

Global warming is one of Mother Nature’s ways of balancing things out. She produces greenhouse gases, more than humans can ever produce. We may contribute, but we’re incidental. Contrary to what we often hear, the human species is not capable of destroying the planet, only ourselves..

We call space, space, because it is mostly empty. In the vastness of the universe and the immensity of time, NOTHING is the rule; SOMETHING is the exception. Likewise, science knows that species SURVIVAL is the exception; EXTINCTION is the rule.

In Nature, the things that can extinct our species that we can’t do anything about, exceed, by a large margin, the things that we can prevent. Still, ignoring the latter will NOT destroy EARTH, but it will speed up our own destruction.

But, I caution you! Cockroaches will survive until our sun, in the throes of its death dirge, engulfs the planet in an incendiary demise. So grit your teeth and bear whatever comes. I’ll be back next week, assuming we’re still here!

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.