Mark America

Slow Boil or Hot Air?

As the nation stands in the path of record cold temperatures, the media is doing its very finest to ignore the implications for “climate change” proponents. In Antarctica, an Australian team aboard a Russian research vessel became entrapped in ice, and now the Chinese icebreaker that provided helicopter rescue to the passengers of the Russian ship also needs to be rescued, itself having become trapped in the expanding ice sheet.  The media reports the entrapment, and the rescue, and now the second ship’s plight, but there are two words they have avoided in coverage of this entire debacle: “Global Warming.” The truth of the matter is that they’ve spent so much time and energy propagandizing on the issue that they dare not tell you the facts: Any measurable global warming halted more than one and one half decades ago.  Telling you this would not comport with their earlier reporting, since in all these years, global CO2(carbon dioxide) levels have continued to rise, but temperatures haven’t followed. According to their theory, global warming should come fast on the heels of any rise in CO2, but that hasn’t been the case.  All of it is predicated on their desire to control human activity, and human use of energy resources is the key.  Why?  Simply put, the global warming/climate change crowd are statists who wish to control everything, everywhere, in every case.  Accusing mankind of wrecking the climate is their sledgehammer, but the global temperatures haven’t been supporting their attack.

They won’t tell you that the very expedition the researchers had been wanting to replicate never experienced the ice levels that this new voyage has experienced.  They won’t now tell you that the purpose of the expedition had been to document shrinking Antarctic ice.  Therefore, team leader Professor Chris Turney dare not tell you that their ship became entrapped some forty miles short of the bay into which Douglas Mawson steamed in open, ice-free waters of Commonwealth Bay in 1912. Here’s video from original footage of that arrival more than a century ago:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-9yJ6-6aEs]

These are the sort of inconvenient truths on which hucksters like Algore should spend a good deal of their time, but it doesn’t fit their tax-justifying agenda, so they refuse to acknowledge all contrary information.  When asked about this, Professor Turney concocted an excuse about the ice that blamed it all on global warming!  There’s more ice than in recorded history on and around Antarctica, but this fool wishes to blame “global warming” or “climate change.”  It’s as though a cosmologist would blame the accelerating expansion of the universe on the long-debunked “steady state” theory.

Sadly, most Americans don’t see the big deal with the current Antarctic ice sheet, because so many Americans don’t realize it’s not Winter, but Summer in the Southern hemisphere.  Mawson’s 1912 expedition was timed to make arrival after the Summer solstice precisely because ice ought to have been at its minimum extent.  What the “warmists” refuse to acknowledge is that there is currently more ice in Antarctica than has existed for 100,000 years.  At present, the combination of Arctic and Antarctic ice is at an all time record.  If this is the case, the global warming hypothesis looks pretty weak, and plainly wrong, but the mainstream media will not tell you this.  Instead, you are faced with having to trawl through site like climatedepot.com, which one could consider like the Drudge Report of climate science, or climatedebatedaily.com, another such site, and there are fantastic blogs like WattsUpWithThat by Anthony Watts.  The problem is that to get any contradictory information, one must venture outside the mainstream media, or risk falling into the mire of group-think that pervades the popular media culture.

I realize that among my readers, there are those who have their doubts, and who worry that perhaps humanity is indeed negatively affecting the environment, but I would suggest to them that humanity’s impact tends to be localized, but not global.  What now becomes clear is that despite all the claims of warming disasters, humanity has little if any effect upon ice in the polar regions. Despite the evidence, we have the preposterous spectacle of the ill-fated expedition’s media director, Alvin Stone, claiming that the ice in which his ship is still lodged is the direct result of global warming. You simply could not make this up.  The truth is that despite all their rationalizations, the facts of nature do not support the foolish, apocalyptic claims of climate doomsayers.

Here are some facts you ought to consider: The life of our sun is roughly nearing the half-way mark.  There is no source in our solar system that can affect climate on Earth like our sun.  As the sun consumes its hydrogen through the process of nuclear fusion, it will expand and grow hotter.  This is inevitable.  The sun will make life increasingly difficult on the Earth until life here becomes impossible.  While this outcome is millions of years away in the future, it is nevertheless an absolute fact.  The truth is that on the largest time-scale, the Earth should be warming, and the sun ought to be delivering the added heat.  When the sun begins to expand dramatically some three billion years hence, life on Earth will be at an end.  Global warming is factually inevitable, but it will have nothing to do with your SUV, or mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

If that is too distant a timescale to contemplate, consider that in a mere one and one-half million years, the star Gliese 710 will pass very close to our solar system.  Having roughly sixty percent of the mass of our sun, it will almost certainly cause gravitational perturbations in the outer regions of our solar system that may send many comets and asteroids heading toward Earth.  Should that happen, unless we’ve concocted a practical method of deflecting or destroying these massive natural missiles, life on Earth could perish.

Still too distant? In the next several decades, there are at least two known asteroids that pose a substantial risk of collision with Earth.  Should that occur, we may go the way of the dinosaur, and it will be an epic calamity that could wipe out the entire human population, and all larger species, though some microbes and slightly larger species may endure.

Is this still too far off in the future to consider? Consider then Wolf-Rayet star 104(WR-104.) This massive star is very near the end of its life. It could explode as a supernova at any moment.  In fact, it may have exploded already, but at a distance of an estimated eight-thousand light-years, the light would need to have traveled that distance (and that many years) for us to learn of it.  If WR-104 had exploded as agriculture began to spread into Europe, and the human population of Earth was around five million, we would learn of the supernova only now.  Worse, we would have no warning whatever, as the arrival of its probable gamma-ray burst would punctuate its end, but also perhaps our own.  There are many stars capable of delivering deadly gamma-ray bursts, but the proximity and orientation of WR-104 makes it more likely to have significant effects on Earth than all the others.  Supernovae that emit a gamma-ray burst do so in blasts from their poles, so that much of the energy is focused in two narrow and opposing beams racing away from the dead star at nearly the speed of light.  If Earth happens to fall within one of these relatively focused beams, and within a few thousand light-years, life might well be wiped out by the radiation.  Though there are now some questions as to WR-104’s precise orientation, such a star’s death could simply poison those exposed to the radiation, or it could strip off the atmosphere and roast us alive.  Some claim it could even vaporize the entire planet. The most energetic events in the universe are not a circumstance with which to trifle, and from our perspective, they could occur at any time.

The point of all this is to recognize the fact that life on Earth will end. There exists almost an infinite range of possibilities for how it will end, but it’s mostly a question of what gets us first, and not whether we’ll be gotten.  The climate change acolytes know this every bit as well as their skeptics, but only the discussion of anthropogenic global warming or climate change gives them an opportunity to command human behavior.  In order to control your lives, they must create some justification, and it’s nearly always couched in terms of some exigency.  I submit to you that the hypothesis of “anthropogenic global warming,” or “climate change,” is precisely that sort of ploy.  When I was a child, they spoke in dramatic terms of a coming ice age.  Then as a young adult, I was bombarded by the global warming hysteria.   In fact, the Earth goes through periodic cycles, as does our sun, and some of those cycles span many human lifetimes.  In that context, it is foolish to pretend that what mankind has done or is doing must be the cause of every fluctuation in the thermometer, never mind to attempt to control all mankind on the basis of these fluctuations. Pretending that mankind is the greatest threat to the planet permits them an excuse to regulate all humans.

When politicians spout dire warnings about global warming, or anything else of dubious human origination, we ought to take the time to politely listen, but then examine their supporting evidence, or the lack thereof.  Now we witness the ignominy of an activist professor, Chris Turney, looking for some way to explain away the fact that his ship got stuck in ice nearly fifty miles from where was once open water at this same time of year, and he absurdly claimed it is because the planet has been warming.  I cannot say with certainty that mankind is having exactly zero effects upon global temperatures, but I can say with certainty that pseudoscience won’t help us, never mind save us. We don’t need modern witch doctors propagating their voodoo to a vast but sadly, too often ignorant audience, and the best way to combat it is to lift the veil of ignorance that has descended over the eyes of our popular media culture. Our lives and our liberties, and indeed the future of mankind depends upon it.