Global Warming -- a long history

Global warming mythology – the idea humanity has the power to change climate reality. What fool would believe we can alter our environment? What idiot would claim man could shape his world?

I guess, only those who have seen dams across rivers, have seen houses replace caves. I guess, only those with eyes to see and brains that think – those who see reality in demonstrative fact.

A columnist recently poked fun at a mid-1970's prediction of a “new ice age”, using it to denounce global warming. In the late 70's, I was doing a book for Harper & Row. It included the Edgar Cayce prophecy that flooding would engulf much of the American coast and create a waterway between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

Googled “new ice age” and get climate models. An expression, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” In climate terms, “It’s always warmest before the freeze.”

In Alaska, permafrost is melting. Houses are collapsing, the support of a hundred years turning to mud. The British climate has changed enough for them plant olive trees which, a decade ago, could only grow in the Mediterranean. Glaciers are breaking free from the polar caps, the famed snows of Kilimanjaro, and the white caps of the European Alps, are vanishing. Could it be the climate is warming?

Listen to the Intelligent Design group, and this is evidence of the their infamous “Intelligent Agent” doing his dirty work to vex man.

The shorthand on the “ice age”: Glaciers melt, diluting ocean salinity, changing the dynamics of currents – Gulf Stream, etc – which transfer heat from the tropics to northern latitudes. Atmospheric warming continues, glacial dilution alters the earths oceanographic circulatory system, heat transfer stops and an ice age ensues.

Brining us back to “the sleeping prophet”, Edgar Cayce, – who was reciting scientific observations which began in 1827, when Jean-Baptiste Fourier coined the greenhouse analogy. By the 1890's – Cayce’s childhood – Chamberlain and Arrhenius, had independently associated climate change with CO2 from burning fossil fuels and it was clear climate would warm and ice would melt.

This brings us back to the Alpine evidence. From 1850 to 1970, the glacial cover receded 35 percent; today, that number is 50 percent – a 15 percent increase over 1850 area, and 42 percent increase in exposed area since 1970. Creationists, cum Intelligent Designers, argue intelligent agent responsibility. OK. It’s still happening.

Cayce, like all “prophets”, reported known facts and projected them forward emphasizing effect over cause. For 180 years, mankind has witnessed, and fed, climate change acceleration. It is choice, the democratic process – "Vox populi, vox Dei" – in action. Blame some unseen, change nothing, and the choice becomes the result.

For those Right-wingers, always living in denial, there has been no change. Hannibal (218 BCE), or the Romans he surprised, would hold otherwise; but historical reality is not Right-wing trait.

We are in an age of final transition. Thomas Jefferson declared “no notice should be taken of the corruptions of reason among the ancients, to wit, the idolatry and superstition of the vulgar, ... “ It would be wise for the Right-wing to cease vulgarity and learn science.

Naturally, being Right-wing acknowledgment of climate change yields as an answer poisoning the environment with nuclear waste.

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