Global Warming Alarmists Want to Keep the Planet in an Artificial Stasis

Fretting about rising sea levels is a hallowed past-time amongst global warming types.  Al Gore and Co. regularly ride through the public square yelling “The ice sheets are melting! The ice sheets are melting!”

Indeed the threat of catastrophic sea level rise due to the melting of polar ice has been one of the prime scare tactics in the alarmists’ arsenal, even if they have occasionally stooped to exaggerating the dangers.  National Public Radio Science Correspondent Richard Harris once lamented this fudging of the truth in an interview with NPR’s Renee Montagne

“Gore said that Arctic ice could be gone entirely in 34 years, and he made it seem like a really precise prediction. There are certainly scary predictions about what’s going to happen to Arctic sea ice in the summertime, but no one can say ‘34 years.’ That just implies a degree of certainty that’s not there. And that made a few scientists a bit uncomfortable to hear him making it sound so precise.”

Harris went on to question some of the outrageous claims made in Gore’s scarumentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“…in [Gore’s] documentary he talks about what the world will look like – Florida and New York – when the sea level rises by 20 feet. But he deftly avoids mentioning the time frame for which that might happen. When you look at the forecast of sea-level rise, no one’s expecting 20 feet of sea-level rise in the next couple of centuries, at least. So that’s another thing that makes scientists a little bit uneasy; true, we have to be worried about global sea-level rise, but it’s probably not going to happen as fast as Gore implies in his movie.”

No kidding.  But Gore’s over-zealous estimations aside, Harris thinks we should still worry about melting ice and its concomitant rise in sea levels.  And we–as in, we the people–are of course to blame with our dirty, carbon-spewing life style.

Warmists are therefore desperate to preserve the polar ice exactly as they are–or rather, exactly as they think they should be.  But this attitude takes for granted the notion that the ice caps are a permanent and unchanging feature of this planet.

Not true.

In fact, the current cap that decorates the top of our world like frozen frosting is a recent phenomenon.  About three million years ago, continental drift brought the once-separate land masses of North and South America together, colliding the two at the Isthmus of Panama.  Suddenly (geologically speaking) the Atlantic Ocean was cut off from warm currents of the Pacific, causing worldwide climactic change. Portions of Africa and Eurasia dried and cooled, replacing once heavily forested regions with savanna and steppes.  And in the far north, the ice began to form.

As Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History writes in his fascinating new book, Masters of the Planet: The Search For Our Human Origins:

“The initiation of the arctic ice cap at around 2.6 million years ago marked the beginning of the ‘Ice Ages’ cycle of alternating glacial and interglacial episodes, as the ice caps at both ends of the Earth regularly expanded and contracted.”

Tattersall goes on to explain the protean nature of these ice caps:

“These fluctuations occurred because of differences in solar radiation received at the planet’s surface due to variations in its orbit around the sun.”

Continental drift.  Fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit.  Changes in the amount and intensity of the Sun’s output.  These and countless of other factors (both known, known unknown, and unknown unknown, to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld’s famous formulation) have interacted with each other over millions of years to produce ice caps that are sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, and sometimes not there at all.

And certain ignorant liberals think a tax on carbon emissions will effect this cycle in the slightest?  Please.

If you have a friend or family member worried about sea levels, remind them of a couple of things:

1. The ice cap was an unstable, relatively new feature of the planet well before the arrival of homo sapiens, much less the Industrial Revolution.
2. Natural forces produced the ice caps, and contributed to their fluctuating size and thickness.
3. Man’s industrial capacity–even if it is effecting the ice–is just another in a long list of natural forces to do so.

That’s right – Man’s industrial capacity is just another natural force, a product of a biological entity pursuing a survival strategy every bit as natural as a beehive or a beaver’s dam.

To sum up:  Polar ice will come and go, but liberal arrogance is forever.