Glo-baloney!

Before I hit my topic, global warming, I want to alert readers to a rumor that the White House is pressuring Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson to vote for the Reid Health care bill by threatening to put Offutt Air Force Base on the base closure list. It would be a weak threat at best as no bases are scheduled to be closed for the next four years or so but it explains a lot about the way the White House works and exposes their willingness to hold national security hostage to their radical leftist agenda. Offutt was the home to the Strategic Air Command Headquarters and is still a vital part of our strategic and nuclear defenses. It is the place that President Bush was sent to in the unsure hours after 9/11. Playing politics with a place that important should be considered treasonous but what else should we expect in the age of the Audacity of Hoax.

While out shoveling snow the other day, I spent the quiet moments ruminating on the controversy over global warming or, as it is known now, global climate change. The recent scandal over the hacked e-mails at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit has done considerable damage to the global warming alarmists who, mercifully, are coming unglued in Copenhagen right now and bolstered the arguments of long time skeptics; myself included. In high school science lab, ignoring a result or leaving out results of a test to get the 'right' answer was known as fudging the data and our science teacher did not tolerate it. Well the e-mails prove that the climate 'scientists' have been fudging their data for some time.

I am a devout Christian but also well educated and have a generally high regard for science. Unlike some Christians (those usually used as examples of scientific ignorance) I have never believed that the Earth is only 6000 years old and I really have no problem reconciling an old Earth with Genesis because I believe in a Genesis gap that allows a long period between the creation of the universe and the formation of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. I do not believe in evolution as it is currently put forward but I accept that there was a creation that existed before Adam and Eve but was, for some reason, wiped out. And I also have never bought into man caused global warming or the potential disaster scenarios put forward by modern 'science'. I am backed up in that belief by the promise of God given to Noah in Genesis 8:22: As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. He also promised Noah never to flood the world again. Obviously God doesn't mean that local conditions will vary but that doesn't alter or abolish the promise. Based on where you live, planting and harvest time rarely vary outside of a couple of weeks and there will be summer and winter in their appropriate place - sometimes mild, sometimes harsh. If Al Gore was a man of real Faith in God, he would not try to convince us that Cuba will disappear under the ocean (never mind that the highest peaks in Cuba are 6000+ feet tall so if it disappears so does much of the rest of the land in the world).

Up until recently the climate alarmists have had it their way on everything. When it got hot that was global warming; if it was extra cold that was global warming; if temperatures were normal for an area that was global warming. Dissent from that line made you a religious fanatic or insane which is the same thing in the eyes of 'learned' men of science. They have ignored the fact that world temperatures have been flat for the last decade and lower in some places. Even now, they claim that 2009 was the 5th warmest year on record in spite of the fact the much of the US and Europe had below normal temperatures last summer. But the real rub is that tiny phrase 'on record'. Accurate temperature readings have only been around for about 2 centuries. Guess what? At the beginning of the 1800s the world was just coming out of the worst of the so-called Little Ice Age that started about 1350 so world temperatures were rising anyway. Not only that but the hyper accurate readings we now get on a world wide scale have only been recorded since the advent of the satellite age (around 50 years but actually less for weather satellites). Looking at 50 years of climate history for the earth is like trying to figure out a murder mystery by opening to the middle and reading a couple of words.

As a historian, I have long known about climate change. One reason the Romans hated being posted to Britain and along the Rhine frontier was because of the cold winters. Supply was difficult in the winter because the Thames froze making it nearly impossible to get to London. Yet as Europe emerged from the 'Dark Ages' temperatures rose and brought on what we know as the Medieval Warm Period. Remember in grade school when we were told that the 'Vikings' told people Greenland was nice so people would go there instead of to Iceland? That was a lie. Coastal Greenland actually was nice. Unlike now, coastal Greenland was ice free and had a growing season similar to that of modern Scandinavia. Many flocked to it and even colonized North America. England was so warm that the Thames did not freeze in the winter and the southern region was better known for good wine than France at that time. By the end of the 12th century the population of Europe was booming thanks to mild winters and unheard of crop yields (keep in mind agriculture was largely the same as it had been during the Roman Empire). That all came crashing to a quick end in the 1350s and 1360s (which proves that the climate can change dramatically and quickly). In the course of two decades the climate changed dramatically. Two consecutive years of wet, cold summers ruined the crops and Europe turned cold, dark, and hungry. The conditions allowed for the great plague that wiped out 1/3 of Europe's population. It would take them until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to get back to pre-plague population levels. The Thames began freezing over again and during the reign of Elizabeth I, people used the frozen river to avoid paying tolls to cross on bridges and played on the ice as well. Queen Victoria is supposed to have learned to ice skate on the frozen Thames but she was also the last British Monarch to witness it freeze over. According to paleo-climatologists we haven't reached the average global temperature that they estimate for the bulk of the Medieval Warm Period. We are several degrees Centigrade below it. While shoveling snow, I find myself strongly in favor of a warmer earth. Longer growing seasons would make food more plentiful than it is now. Mild winters would drop demand for heating oil and make us less dependent on Middle East Oil. Shorter, milder winters would mean I could spend less time scooping frozen water off my walk and more time telling everyone what I think...and that IMHO, is a much better use of my time!