Well, we're getting to the close of the
Durban Conference:
It's been pretty predictable. For weeks
now we've seen the claws come out as one media report after another has blasted
us "Climate Change" deniers as everything from stupid Bubba to greedy
Simon Legree in the pay of the oil industry. In the interest of setting
the record straight right now, I don't see a dime from them.
Climate Change, that's the new buzzword since
warming took a hike for the last decade or so. It's also a strawman since
informed "climate change deniers" are nothing of the kind. Long
before that name was coined we busily pointed out that the climate changes all
the time instead of going through the kind of warming the IPCC was promoting
ala Mann and his hockey stick graph. In fact, we've pointed out that the
planet has been warming for three-hundred years.
Three hundred years ago we began to emerge
from the Little Ice Age, something the IPCC cites Mann’s graph as proof never having
occurred. Yet three-hundred year plus
ago the Hudson used to regularly freeze over solidly enough people walked
back and forth over it. Accounts of the
time tell us that the water between Long Island and the
mainland froze over just as solidly as well.
The Mississippi froze over solidly enough as late as 1834 that families
used to cross it in their covered wagons in the wintertime. When Washington took his army across the Delaware River the crossing was difficult for them, because the
river was practically choked with ice flows and the situation was
dangerous. In fact it was so much so
that the British hadn’t even bothered to post look outs along the rivier.
During that time the Thames
regularly froze over solidly enough people could travel up and down it on the
ice. Londoners used to have ice
festivals right on the river itself until part way into the nineteenth
century. Other major rivers through out Europe
did the same. That’s how cold the world
was before warming occurred. But you
wouldn’t know it to listen to the folks at Durban and the IPCC, much less their minions in the media.
Then, starting about three-hundred years ago,
things started warming up. By the end of
the nineteenth century all the aforementioned rivers had stopped freezing over
regularly, and didn’t do so solidly enough for people to safely cross on
foot. Those are historical facts.
So the climate does change and has been for
three centuries now. And most of that
warming occurred well before mankind supposedly started upping the CO2
concentration of the earth’s atmosphere in a major way. While I disagree with the premise that
mankind is the major contributor to the increase in CO2 concentrations for
reasons I’ve already blogged about, the global warming activists are still left
with the fact that before mankind could’ve been a factor the planet was
already warming.
So, we are not climate change deniers, they
are because they deny the climate changed before the modern age in spite of the
massive evidence it did. They point to
two graphs based on cherry-picked tree ring data and deny any change occurred in
the climate until man started loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. We “deniers” are the realists since we admit
the climate changes in cycles which aren’t fully understood, but documented in
the historical age as well as by proxy.
Still in the face of the evidence otherwise
the denial still goes on and the warmists still propose the same old worn-out
solutions like a broken record, kill our economies with crippling CO2 reduction
policies.
Here is a post on weather conditions during the Maunder Minimum, which couldn't have been a significant factor in the weather of the contemporary Little Ice Age if we take the position of warming scientists as to the significance of the sun's effe3cts on warming:
