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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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August 1, 2007
by Gordon Francis Corbett
People forget that when Erik the Red named Greenland, its southern portion was green. "Wikipedia" reports that when Erik arrived circa 982, "The fjords of the southern part of the island were more lush and had a warmer climate at that time, and herbaceous plants grew in the south of the island." "Wikipedia" notes that after arriving around 984, Icelandic settlers formed "remote communities that lived off farming, hunting and trading with the motherland..." It also says that after 450 years of habitation, these settlements disappeared. My guess is that two things did them in: inbreeding caused by their isolation, and the climate's gradual freezing. Of course, most of Greenland was frozen. Oberlander's and Muller's textbook, "Essentials of Physical Geography Today," says on Page 477:
Similar variations have occurred elsewhere. Dinosaurs walked a hot Earth; mammoths foraged amid drifts of snow. Nor has Earth seen its last Ice Age. Oberlander and Muller say on Page 473, "Ice Age conditions are likely to be repeated within the next 20,000 years." None of these extremes resulted from human action. Ditto for what has come to be called the "Little Ice Age." Using different sets of criteria, climatologists have calculated that it began at different points, from 1250 to 1615. It did not restore the thick sheet of ice that had marked Europe during the prior Ice Ages, but the Little Ice Age did make crop-raising undependable, cause torrential rains, and even cause a two-year famine. Check the internal search engine of the web-site, "WorldNet Daily." You will find several articles refuting the current orthodoxy that human activities are causing greenhouse gases, and that the consequently rising temperatures will kill us all. First, it is not certain that our globe is warming. Many climatologists uninvolved in politics dispute this allegation from their politically minded fellows. Second, it is laughable that we humans could be responsible for any change that is occurring. Nothing we have been doing could possibly produce the results ascribed to us. Before I left California in 1993, I took a course in physical geography from Dr. R. E. Engelbretson at Salinas's Hartnell Community College. Dr. Engelbretson told us that our globe's climate has varied widely for three basic reasons. Volcanoes have sent enormous clouds of ash into our atmosphere. The Sun's emission of gamma radiation has varied. The tilt of the Earth's axis has changed rather suddenly several times. Studies of trees' rings and of ice borings tell scientists when these things have occurred, but nobody has learned yet how to predict them. The BBC just aired "The Great Global Warming Swindle." I can hardly wait to see it here. Presuming that it is done well, and that its science is sound, it may torpedo the whole controversy. If it does, the focus of the debate will change. Climatic change, of whatever kind, is factual. It alters the conditions under which we exist. The rich adjust best. The poor adjust worst. Some say that to help the poor, mankind should organize governmentally. Others recommend that we forget governmental planning and let individual people create and select the goods and services they deem most likely to promote survival. As I distrust the whole idea of central planning, and believe that the average person knows how to run his life better than any bureaucrat, I prefer the second option. A great many of the corporations lining up to back the "global warming" fraud--and it is a fraud--are corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations. These gentry want to curb our way of life: not to save the world, but to decide who will live with what degree of comfort. I recommend to everyone that they telephone the Council and request a free copy of their Annual Report. Mine, soon to be three years old, has taught me a lot. It lists both individual and corporate memberships. Finding that supposedly objective authorities on my television screen belong to this group has been an eye-opener. I cannot recommend telephoning the Council for your own copy with the old commercial's suggestion, "Try it, you will like it." Far from it: like it you will not. But, it might do for you what mine has done for me.
Enrich your life with a book about politics and current events...
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