Good gracious!! I find myself agreeing with Ray.
Just to update the following account a little bit, the latest
satellite temperature recordings (now with about 30 years of
continuous comparable records) show that mid-atmospheric temperatures
(the ones that were previously considered crucial by the global
warmists) are declining, not rising.
I'll grant the global warmists one concession. Eleven thousand years
of agriculture (that is, of mass forest burning) and 200 years of
mass fossil fuel burning have undoubtedly put more CO2 into the air
than otherwise and may have delayed the next Ice Age but the latter
is still infinitely more on the cards than any 'runaway' global warming.
Keith
At 05:39 30/11/2011, REH wrote:
Mike Hollinshead and I wrote a paper for the Canadian Truth and
Reconciliation commission. Here is a section about the environment that we
wrote:
From: Crossing the Divide, Mike Hollinshead and Ray Evans Harrell
copyright 2007
"What will add bite to this situation is the fact that two other great
forces will come into play which no-one is paying attention to: a
devastating cooling in global climate, which may rival the cold temperatures
at the worst point of the Little Ice Age; and a new industrial revolution
which is going to radically reorder the global economic pecking order and,
therefore, the relative military capacities of the great powers and produce
new weapons of extraordinary power and risk.
Contrary to the consensus, global cooling is a far greater risk than global
warming. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a dead issue, people just do
not know it yet. The ice cores show quite clearly that CO2 levels grow
following a warming, not before, so that the modern rise in CO2 is due to
the natural warming which occurred as the world came out of the Little Ice
Age after the mid 18th century. Warming oceans exhale CO2. Moreover, when
CO2 levels grew faster after 1950, global temperatures fell until 1975.
They only rose after 1975 and then started to fall again after 1998. They
are still falling. During all this time, CO2 levels have continued to
climb. There is clearly no correlation between CO2 levels and global
temperature. The warming has all occurred at measurement sites in the far
north, in Canada and Russia. Everywhere else temperatures have been level
or falling. It is night temperatures that have been measured to rise.
Almost certainly, the measured warming is due to the growth of northern
communities, new activities such as power generation and mining there and
improved space heating, all of which create what is called an urban heat
island effect and create a spurious warming effect which is highly local.
Any warming which has occurred, for example between 1900 and 1950, is
therefore natural and has been driven by cycles in the output of the Sun.
Scientists who study the Sun are unanimous in forecasting that the next
solar cycle, which is about to begin, will see much lower solar activity.
It may go as low as the minimum seen in the late 17th century, which saw
widespread crop failures around the world and was a significant contributing
factor to the social and economic unrest which led to the Thirty Years War
and the civil wars in England and France. The solar minimum is expected to
last from 2015 to 2040, with the lowest point at the end.
Climatic cooling slows the world's wind system. The winds which carry rain
to the continental interiors, where most of the world's food is grown,
weaken and frequently fail. The same is true for the South and Central
American Highlands. Drought causes crop failures. It was drought caused by
climatic cooling which brought all the great world civilizations down,
including those in the Americas. The droughts which accompanied the Little
Ice Age which began in the early 13th century weakened the American
civilizations and made it easier for the Europeans to conquer them. When
the wind systems are weak, the jet streams are also weak and tend to wander
further away from the poles. They also tend to lock in place, creating
great loops which, depending on where they do so, can bring tropical air to
the Boreal Forest and Arctic air to the Gulf of Mexico. The tropical air
brings torrential rains and devastating floods. So, ironically, cooler
climate creates more extreme weather. That is what we are experiencing now:
a continual see-sawing between extremes of heat and flood caused by locked
jet stream loops.
In the world of today, where food reserves are minimal and are being reduced
further as food crops such as corn are being diverted into producing
biofuels, this is not good news. What is even worse news is that cool
periods begin suddenly. The 1290s were the warmest decade of the Medieval
Warm Period. The ten years after 1312 were some of the coldest of the
Little Ice Age which followed, and caused crop failures and famines several
years in a row around the world. In principle, the effects of a sudden
cooling today on food production and nutrition need not be that devastating.
In the civilizations of the 13th century, there was a limited number of
crops which were tuned to a narrow range of climatic conditions, very poor
transportation systems and a limited role for markets in food products.
Today a wide range of crops which thrive in a wide range of conditions is
available anywhere in the world. Efficient transportation systems exist
which can move food rapidly around the globe from surplus to deficit
regions. And we have highly efficient market oriented agricultural systems
which respond quickly to changing conditions. Huge quantities of grain
could be freed up for humans by radically reducing domestic livestock
populations and the adoption of a low meat diet. However, successful
adaptation requires that there be sufficient anticipation that sufficient
seeds of the right kind are available when they are needed, that farmers are
prepped and ready to change, that people are ready to change their diets and
that the world system is disposed to share surpluses with starving people
with no money to buy food. None of these things can be taken for granted.
A world view infused with Aboriginal myths and values such as are contained
in the First and Third Fires and the principles of balance, harmony and
everyone included in the community of concern would go a long way to
ensuring that the correct measures will be taken in time.
Coolings are also associated with pandemics of disease. In fact, every
great disease pandemic in history correlates with a sudden climatic cooling.
Failed crops mean starvation for people and their livestock. Starving
people migrate in search of food for themselves and their animals. Starving
people will eat things which they would not normally consider and which may
even be taboo because they are known to carry disease, such as the marmots
living on the border of Tibet and China, which carry the bacterium which
causes bubonic plague. In the early 13th century, malnourished, migrating
steppe nomads contracted the disease in this way and then carried it into
China and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, from whence it spread to Western
Europe. It killed between one third and one half of the populations of
China and Europe. AIDs and Ebola fit this pattern.
A sudden cooling at this stage of human history could spring pathogens and
their hosts out of their usual places in nature and into close contact with
humans. This risk will be especially high in areas where deforestation is
reducing the habitat of many species and bringing people in contact with
them who have no resistance and, being recent immigrants, have no local
knowledge to leave things alone. The mega cities of the Third World, with
their tens of millions of people living in unsanitary and sub-standard
housing and with poor medical and public health systems could become
reservoirs of infection, which modern air transport would spread worldwide
in weeks before medical authorities fully realized what was going on.
Warfare would make the situation worse, as it destroys the infrastructure
which shelters, feeds and clothes people and treats their illnesses.
Invaders steal crops and food and destroy houses, factories, hospitals,
clinics, roads and bridges. This is what happened in the 13th and 17th
centuries in Europe, in the 13th century in China and in the Americas in the
15th century. An example closer in time is the mass starvation in Biafra
during the Nigerian civil war.
New technologies always spawn new weapons. The same atlatl that made killing
mastodons and bison more efficient also made killing humans more efficient.
Nine thousand year old Kennewick Man had an atlatl point in his hip. One
doesn't suppose it got there by accident. Gunpowder made highly decorative
fire works; it also made highly effective firearms. Steel made excellent
needles and razors; it also made quick-firing artillery, tanks and
dreadnought battleships. The atomic bomb may be the only new weapon that
was intended from the beginning as a weapon and then found a peaceful
(though highly dangerous) use. Biotechnology and nanotechnology are no
different. The major powers have been making biochemical weapons for half a
century already. The Russians continued to develop them despite an
agreement with the United States to stop developing them and destroy
stockpiles, an agreement the Americans seem to have kept. The Russians have
developed hyper-toxic antibiotic-resistant variants of plague and smallpox
as well as anthrax. It is expected that the nano-bio-technology technique
of self-assembly will lead to potent, intelligent weapons which can be
manufactured in quantity virtually over night. They would make themselves.
An arms race could begin one day and be over the next i.e. the war may have
already been fought and won in 48 hours. These are ideal weapons for
terrorists and failed states: small, cheap to make, and easy to learn how to
do in the age of the Internet. Some would argue this what you get when you
do alchemy without a sense of the sacred. We need a bio-nano arms ban
before an arms race begins.
------------
COMMENT: We coauthored this paper on the problem of reconciliation between
populations that were destroyed by the theft of Indian Children and the
destruction through church schools of the Indian culture. Since Indian
culture is based in the study of nature and the management of natural
systems for the good of the whole of the environment, it was natural that
there would be a section on the stories evolving about global warming and
climate change. The connection of these things to the history of the
"Little Ice Age" around the world, how it happened, what it's processes were
and the order of those processes. What the affects were on the people and
how that compares to the present.
I would welcome any discussion about these points that we made. We are
talking about large patterns of cycles that have a human component but given
the current problems of understanding large scale systems like the weather,
plus the myths of human potency in these things I feel a healthy skepticism.
Western science has been horrendous at replacing native Agricultural
technology choosing instead to go the route of Monsanto. The subtle care
of the Forests of the nation has been completely beyond modern science and
Western patience. What was a massive garden has become a mess and a forest
gone to seed. We seem completely incapable of understanding natural
systems at all. So I'm afraid that I have a healthy skepticism about a lot
of this stuff but I welcome any discussion of these comments.
There is an earlier section in the paper that speaks more about the problems
of weather systems but I thought that you all probably know a lot about that
anyway given your expertise. This section is about observation and
interpretation of certain core data as well as the history of parallel
patterns in earlier eras and what happened. Thanks in advance.
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 10:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: The Coming Green Wave: Ocean Farming
Regarding:
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/11/the-coming-green-wave-ocean-
farming-to-fight-climate-change/248750/
Pete wrote:
> This article is rather disinformative with its use of semi-science
> terminology which is simplified to the point of being wrong
> ....
> Extraordinarily sloppy writing, obviously a techno-illiterate.
Thanks, Pete. Was going to write something like that but
procrastinated and you beat me to it.
It is rumored that way back when I went to collitch, people got a
better education than they do today. But I recall those of my
contemporaries who were on the humanities side of CP Snows two
cultures fulfilled their university science requirement by taking
botany 101 and zoology 101. These consisted chiefly of memorizing the
taxonomic hierarchies of the plant and animal kingdoms. As a result,
for many very bright and (for practical career purposes) well educated
people, simple chemistry is a black art and "The Chemicals" is a
bogey-man word.
It's no wonder that "environmentalism" or "climate change" are seen as
political conspiracies when so many people have approximately zero
mental tools to evaluate professional pronouncements on the science,
never mind the journalistic contributions of techno-illiterates.
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/11/
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