They hate being laughed at. Today I got another letter a propos the piece of climate porn I mentioned two days ago. This from somebody else, a guy who blocked my emails two years ago on the grounds that I am an incorrigible deplorable.
I present my rebuttal, composed for that distribution of folks who will surely disagree, mainly so I can reproduce it here. The author of the piece, which you will find highlighted in yellow in the left-hand column of table halfway through this post – my responses in the right hand side – never fails to (ahem!) let you know he has a degree from MIT. Be forewarned, ye peasants! Anyhow, this is what I wrote.
"We hear once again from the banks of the Charles. I thought I had been banished forever.
Your timeline starts at 800,000 years ago, very recently in geological time. About the middle of the reign of Homo erectus. That's about 2/10 of 1% of the time since multicellular life appeared on earth and green plants appeared on land. Your graph is even shorter – starts about Neanderthal time, 400,000 years ago.
In the approximately one half billion years of multicellular life there were five major extinctions. Per Peter Brannen, "The Ends of the World" those extinctions were huge volcanic events which threw massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, far more than is currently buried in fossil fuels.
At some points there was 20 times as much carbon dioxide in the air as there is today. However, the temperatures, though were not radically higher. The latest great extinction, 65 million years ago, wiped out a majority of animal species. Although mammals had evolved a hundred million or more years earlier, and birds from dinosaurs within the previous few tens of millions of years, they did not come into their own until the great extinction wiped out the dinosaurs.
Modern life forms were certainly able to tolerate higher temperatures than now. They tolerated in excess of the additional 5°C that the IPCC projects could be brought on by burning all of the earth's remaining endowment of fossil fuels. Even if the greenhouse effect hypothesis for global warming were exactly as posited by Al Gore and the alarmists.
However, recent climate history undermines the supposed connection between carbon dioxide and temperature. As you point out, within our lifetimes carbon dioxide has gone up from 280 ppm to 400. Meanwhile, temperatures have hardly budged, even with the most egregious fudging on the part of climate scientists. The experience of our own eyes tells us that greenhouse gas theory is a bust.
What happened to all of that carbon dioxide from the huge volcanic eruptions causing the great extinctions? A lot of it was removed from the air by inorganic chemical processes, but much of it made its way into fossilized organic material. That is a primary reason that carbon dioxide levels in the air diminished so significantly over the past 50 million years. Here is a graph from Paleoclimate – Princeton Primers in Climate. It shows that carbon dioxide levels were approximately 1000 to 1500 ppm 50 million years ago, as our monkey ancestors were evolving. Note that the time graph goes backwards - more recent CO2 readings are on the left, not the right.
Temperatures did in fact cool to the levels you show for the last 800,000 years. That's 0.02% of the earth's 4 billion years. Not a whole lot. They were of course not stable, as the graph you show for the past 400,000 years indicates. They were usually lower, though periodically – about every 80,000 years – higher than today's temperature.Here is a point-by-point rebuttal to your post. Your points in yellow, my response in white.
Even if you were right, and temperatures today exceeded any precedent in paleoclimatic history, and the hypothesis that carbon dioxide is a primary driver of global warming were to be true, you would still have to answer some difficult questions.
1. First, explain why the very expensive efforts taken to date have had little or no measurable impact on the climate.
2. Second, explain how you are going to get the rest of the world – China, India and the rest – to do anything about their carbon emissions, which will comfortably exceed ours in any case.
It would be stupid to allow you to waste my time like this, but it serves another purpose. You have given me a useful post for my blog today. For my readership of wokedom deniers.
I laugh at climate alarmists. I wouldn't care at all except that these nut cases want to alter the world to stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, which means that they are trying to shove their Net Zero insanity on the rest of us. Personally, I can do without any more coercion from dummies. Over my lifetime, there have been so many crises which have not delivered that I have to laugh at their stupidity, but I do find one thing alarming. All this talk of climate catastrophe is traumatizing children, who can't see through the horse shit and actually believe that they are going to die in less than ten years. Actually, Saint Greta said we had only ten years left five years ago, so according to that paragon of Climate fear, we have only five years left.
Does anybody else remember the Ozone Hole, the Y2K crisis, the Earthquakes in California, The Population Bomb, AIDS, and other potential catastrophes? Remember Chicken Little? The sky is not falling.
Lots of independent evidence shows that global warming is truly a ho hum event. I recently watched a video from Greenland where scientists have been sampling ice cores back thousands of years and the net result was that the period 1850-1870 was the coldest period of the Little Ice Age. It was at that point that better instruments appeared to measure temperature and climate. What if the whole climate change argument is based on readings taken in 1870? What if that was the lowest temperature on the planet in the past twelve thousand years? Isn't this a case of the three blindmen feeling different parts of the elephant and describing it differently? If you measure at the lowest point, then naturally it's getting warmer and I'm glad. Warmer weather is better in my opinion.
Greenland was warmer in the Medieval warm period than it is now, and the Vikings who settled there thrived and grew wheat where now it is impossible. I have heard that some people argue that yes, it was warm in the European part of the world, but I read a history of China which shows that on the opposite side of the globe it got very cold too, no crops, canals freezing. This cold snap corresponds to the Little Ice Age in Europe and brought about the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols of Kublai Khan for those who don't know their Chinese history.
The globe has warmed in my lifetime. There are glaciers that I crossed in my many alpine adventures which are no longer there, or which have shrunken. I recall reading in the late 18th Century that those same glaciers were growing and threatening the existence of Swiss villages. Priests led pilgrimages to the snout of those glaciers to beg God not to crush their homes. Now, we no longer believe in God, so we turn to scientists who are funded by governments who must justify their existence by finding something wrong.
I also heard a report that the world is 35% greener today than it was a hundred years ago. In other words all that carbon in the atmosphere is helping trees and plants to grow. It is that abundance that the Malthusians can't accept. They have a dark vision that terrible things are about to overwhelm humanity. Like Noah constructing an ark, they are sure that it's the end of life as we know it. Right, we're all doomed. Sorry, I want nothing to do with your neuroses. Leave us alone to live a full and rich life in a warmer world.
I'd love to see the holier-than-thou, sanctimonious email from the MIT grad. :)