Growing wine in Greenland

Call it an educated guess, call it a stab in the dark, but I would lay odds on there being a 100% correlation between climate change deniers and intelligent design believers. Came to me most recently in the blathering over the battle between Al Gore and an ignorant judge and an even more ignorant truck driver in England. The truck driver didn't want his children taught that the world was in serious trouble. The judge's decision and the reasons he gave, could have been any troll on Huffington Post at any time in the last couple of years. And of course, since a judge had criticized aspects of the Gore presentation, out came the trolls, frothing at the mouth again. Trotting out all the same old arguments as to why they didn't want to believe the world was in serious trouble.

And this stuff is so familiar, has been asked and answered so many times, that those of us living in the reality based universe are constantly puzzled as to why these people can't actually understand the evidence in front of their eyes as another chunk of ice breaks of Greenland, and Canada sets up a military base to protect the melted north west passage against the marauding Russians and Americans.

It was when I saw yet another string of comments about how climate has changed in the past that I saw the light, saw the sun shining brightly, free of sun spots.

If you believe, truly believe, have faith in, know unmistakably, that the world is only 6000 years old, and that human beings are, therefore, no older, then past and future climatic change has a quite different meaning. If you believe that wine growing in England, and crops in Greenland, and the River Thames freezing over, are all not only true (they aren't of course) but significant climatic events, then you also know that humans lived through those changes.

And carrying the logic even further, if the climate has changed in the past, and the Earth and humans are only 6000 years old, then humans have lived through any and all changes that Mother Nature has thrown at us in the past, and will do so in the future. If dinosaurs and humans coexisted, then whatever happened to get rid of the dinosaurs had no effect on humans.

Those of us desperately riding from Boston to Lexington to try to sound the alarm before it is too late tend to think that while everyone agrees on the facts (the British are indeed crossing the river) of global warming there is honest (mostly) disagreement on the degree of danger and the response needed. But increasingly it seems to me that the words used provide no common frame of reference for the fundamentalist climate change deniers (just as for the fundamentalist evolution deniers).

For the deniers, climate change in the past is a reason not to worry about climate change in the future. For those of us in the real world, climate change in the past is precisely the reason we need to worry. We know that, yes indeedy, the climate of the Earth has often changed before. No argument there. In fact the climate has changed so much that it is frightening to realize how much it CAN change. We are not living in some Garden of Eden, some Camelot, celestial air conditioners keeping everything just so for god's chosen species. We are living in a world that can get very much colder than today, and, more relevant in the circumstances in which we find ourselves in 2007, very much hotter.

Thing is, humans, the species Homo sapiens, wasn't around at all during the earlier really severely hot periods. Even our ape ancestors weren't. And the species that were around were forced into extinction in massive numbers. Humans and other hominid species were around in the last million years or so, during the climate cycles of the Pleistocene. Saw the sea levels rise and fall by a few meters at a time, saw glaciers expand and contract, saw forests bloom and then get replaced by deserts. Not as severe as some earlier changes, but not pleasant.

But during that time humans and their ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In small groups and small total numbers. Able to move with the changes. And with no infrastructure (houses, farms, ports, roads, office buildings) to worry about leaving behind or having destroyed. Even taking all that into account, at least one close human relative, Neanderthal Man, went extinct, and many other more distant cousins didn't make it either. Not until about ten thousand years ago (no Virginia, not 6000), when agriculture was underway, did humans start living in the kind of societies that are more familiar to us now, and for all of that period the climate has been stable. That is, the development of modern civilization, and the increase of population to 6 billion plus, has all happened in favorable climatic conditions.

So yes, the climate has changed in the distant past, and yes, it even changed while humans were evolving (and may well have contributed to that evolutionary process), but no, it hasn't changed in any significant way during the rise of Homo civilizensis. In the next thirty years or so it is going to, rapidly.

So if you were taking comfort from past climatic change, happy that humans had survived, because the bible tells you so ..... don't.

The things that you're liable to read in the bible ... ain't necessarily so. The things that you're liable to read on The Watermelon Blog, on the other hand ....

Follow David Horton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/watermelon_man

Comments

[mgloraine]

I read a good article a few days back in the Christian Science Monitor regarding climate change "contrarians":

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1004/p13s03-sten.html

There is some discussion of the gripes voiced by the deniers, but the last word comes from Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (I'm quoting from the article):
"
"The basic reality of anthropogenic global climate change is no longer a subject of scientific debate," she concludes.

Her study implies that since the IPCC must draw from scientific literature, it didn't find many papers that argued against human-driven change. Contrarian studies didn't make it through science's portal to respectability: scientific journals.

Maybe the scientific community does have it wrong about climate change, Oreskes says. After all, the majority has been incorrect before. But in this case, the contrarians are not, as they often paint themselves, on science's vanguard, she says. The discussion of global warming among scientists is not new – it's been going on for half a century, Oreskes says. The skeptics have had their day in court, she says: "It's just that nobody agrees with them."
"

Well put! I believe we could get a similar response from qualified scientists with regard to evolution deniers, who have had a good deal more than half a century to make THEIR case. They are, of course, at liberty to espouse any theory they like, no matter how inane. But no one who has looked at the evidence presented by the geologic and fossil record will agree with them.

There is a good blurb in the Wikipedia regarding the status of evolution as both fact and theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact

[SamThornton]

Even relatively small climate changes can have enormous effects on humans.

A period of cooling is correlated with advent of the Black Death in Europe, for example, by providing a more favorable environment for the propagation of disease-bearing rodents and insects that carried the disease to the human population.

The good news is that humans, by virtue of their culture, are able to quickly adapt to changing conditions. The bad news is that the methods of adaptation may be extremely nasty, cruel and inhumane.

It's all about resources and our ability to exploit them. If our technology is sufficient to overcome the consequences of global climatic changes, the conditions become a simple speed bump. If not, conditions lead to such human specialties as war and genocide.

We live in interesting times.

[Doofus]

David, there doesn't *need* to be a correlation, of course.

An interesting aspect of the 'climate change'
problem is that one may actually observe that
it's happening, and then say:

1) It's too late for us to do anything about it.

2) It's a natural phenomenon, happened many
times before, etc. (Therefore) it will fix itself.

3) End times are coming. Repent, prepare, etc.

4) Worse things could happen. Asteroid impacts,
black hole collisions, etc.

The point, then, is that belief in 'intelligent design'
is nothing more than a quaintly amusing foible.
And as for the other? Don't worry, be happy.

[veracitatus]

Hi David,

I've also noticed a strong correlation between global warming deniers (and peak oil deniers) and another brand of religious-like faith, namely in the so-called free market and modern corporation-based capitalism. Libertarians are the worst it seems. They have no real evidence of claims about how efficient and effective a free market is since there has never been anything like it, except possibly in the earliest days of the Wild West. And the only reason the West developed was because of the move-in by entrepreneurs who quickly sought subsidies and protections once they got a foothold.

So I basically agree that blind faith has a lot to do with an incapability to see reality for, well, what it really is!

Now the fact that blind faith appears to be built into the average human brain and gets increasingly invoked during times of stress (like information overload in an overly complex society), it doesn't fill me with a great deal of confidence that Homo sapiens is long for this world. One hopes that variability in phenotypes has produced a variant of the species that is far less inclined toward faith-based thinking. Then one hopes that the coming selective pressures due to climate change will weed out the faithful! Only the realist should be able to survive in that not-too-distant future world.

V.

[David Horton - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks V, I agree entirely. I increasingly see that the "discussions" about global warming are falsely based on the idea that when we use words, or quote evidence, we all accept those ideas and data as meaning the same thing. The most notable example of this I think is the "climate has changed in the past" concept. Another is "the world is warming" which the deniers see as a good thing. Another is the difference between the Celsius and Farhenheit temperature measurements. Another is the difference between climate and weather (just yesterday I saw yet again the proposition that because weather forecasters can't be sure what the weather will be in 7 day's time in, say, Chicago, they can have no idea of what the climate will be in 7 years or 70 years). We all think we speak the same language but we may often not be doing so.
Regards
D.