Here are a couple of passages from the “Big Children’s Encyclopedia” that I’m reading. It is a translation of the “I Wonder Why Encyclopedia”, copyright 2003 by Macmillan children’s books.
“If the earth gets very hot, ice on the poles could melt. Then the sea level would rise and many places along the coastline would find themselves underwater.”
“What is the greenhouse effect? As scientists describe the effect, the problem appears as the warming of the atmosphere. Gases from the burning of fuel for electric power stations, factories, and motor vehicle engines accumulate in the air and traps heat near the Earth's surface. When the air close to the earth heats up it is similar to a greenhouse.”
I am pleased with myself that I'm able to read the stuff in Ukrainian. There is a lot of dictionary work, but as I keep slogging I find my retention improves.
On the other hand, this message about global warming is everywhere. Global warming was a sticking point 14 years ago when I taught a semester of ecology at the International Christian University here in Kiev. I tried to explain that the greenhouse effect was no more than a theory and that the evidence was mixed. My students were not prepared to accept any doubt.
I am afraid that continues to be the case. The schools that my children attend likewise spit out the global warming story as dogma. It is losing traction in the United States. As people figure out that they have been lied to about everything else, they figure maybe they should also question global warming. But it will take a long time to turn the ship around.
People are scratching their heads and asking what happened to Harvard. It is good that things are changing, but it will be quite a while before they dig deep enough to get through the rot in K-12 education. I’m glad to be in a position to handle that myself. This time around. By the time I recognized how they were indoctrinating my now-grown family, it was a lost cause.
A bit of serendipitous news, a month or so ago I did search for some maps of the emergence of the six modern continents (Eurasia being a single continent) from the Pangaea of 200 million years ago. There is some beautiful stuff out there.
My question related to the claim in this children's encyclopedia that the large flightless birds of Australia, South America and Africa – emu, rhea and ostrich – had a common ancestor. How could that be, I wondered, if Pangaea split up 180 million years ago and birds evolved only 120 million years ago? It turns out that real scientists don't think that it's true.
Along the way I learned about the South American terror birds, some of them 10 feet tall, which were apex predators up until the American continents connected only 2 million years ago. Kids who love dinosaurs should be into these guys. They were pretty nasty pieces of work, and I had never heard of them. Whatever their merits, they went extinct after big cats were able to migrate south from North America.
Back to the subject of global warming, the people who published those beautiful maps have me on a list for distribution of PDFs on paleoclimate. Here is a link to a very informative article entitled "Some Thoughts on Global Climate Change."
The authors describe the science of reconstructing past climates from the geological record – types of plant and animal remains, the abundance of isotopes such as oxygen 18, mineral deposits such as bauxite, which is formed when it is warm and wet, the rocks dropped by melting icebergs and so on. When they correlate all of the evidence, they get a fairly clear picture of how things were.
Their 55-page PDF is half footnotes. It is serious. The authors have created some wonderful graphs to include among their text. They characterize seven climate states that have existed over the past half billion years. Significantly, all of them have appeared in the last 65 million years since the extinction of the dinosaurs. They are hothouse, warming greenhouse, greenhouse, cooling greenhouse, icehouse and severe icehouse.
The average temperature at the equator has remained quite constant at 25°C – 77° Fahrenheit. It is the temperature at the poles, and thus the gradient between the equator and the poles, which has changed radically.
The last graph they present summarizes the whole argument.
The earth was in severe icehouse conditions in the last Ice Age. Per this graph it has warmed up to merely “icehouse” at the present. The last figure in the graph represents the most extreme imaginable global warming, extrapolating what would happen using the worst-case IPCC estimates for the correlation between CO2 and temperature if humanity was able to quickly burn the Earth’s entire remaining endowment of fossil fuels . Ehhh. Not even back up to the historical average. Nothingburger.
Going back to what has happened throughout paleohistory, the authors show the following temperature gradients between the poles and the equator. When it gets cold, it is cold at the higher latitudes. Today’s average temperature at the South Pole is -48.65°. That’s not even “icehouse.” It is one and a half degrees short of “severe icehouse.”
I recommend the entire article. If for whatever reason they won’t let you download it, write to me and I will send it to you.
There are a couple takeaway points. The first one is that the average temperature at the hottest point on the planet is always at the equator and has never exceeded about 77°F. We are never going to burn up. The second is that the earth’s average temperature is still far, far below the average over paleohistory. There is absolutely no need to panic.
The question you should ask yourself about every such panic is, “cui bono?” Who benefits from panicking you? Anybody who is reading the news sees pieces daily to the effect that solar power is a bust, wind energy is a colossal, money-losing fiasco, and electric cars are not only expensive and unreliable, but they cause more pollution over their lifetimes than internal combustion engines. Maybe the naysayers are right. And if they are right about global warming, might they be right about public health, public debt, gender and a few other issues? Enquiring minds want to know. Or at least ought to want to know.
I am pleased to be mostly over a cold. I should be ready for the exercise bicycle about the time my foot is again up to it. In the meantime, I’m pampering myself, lying in bed with the elbow warmer I bought for my bursitis wrapped around my foot. Oksana has invited the parents of a new kid in the kindergarten to dinner tomorrow. Mom is a Canadian married to a Ukrainian.
My major social connections are increasingly through Oksana. Finally up to venturing out of the house yesterday to go shopping, I found myself riding to and from town with Galya, one of Oksana’s English students. She wanted conversation far more than English practice, so we spoke Russian. She has confided to Oksana that her English lessons are as much an excuse to get out of the house as to learn language. In the course of our conversation, I learned that she was triple jabbed against Covid. She didn’t mention any adverse reactions, and I certainly didn’t ask. We were able to agree that the jabs did not prevent disease or transmission and that it ought to be an individual decision whether you get them or not.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man spends a lot of time working with Zoriana on math and English. Her first-grade math gets a frequent workout playing dominoes, and she loves to lie next to me in bed as she attempts to read Calvin and Hobbes. The vocabulary is a bit over her head, but she gets a lot out of it with me helping her through the longer words.
For the lulz, you might enjoy watching this episode of "In Search of..." from 1978, narrated by Leonard Nemoy, titled "In Search of the Coming Ice Age."
There was a PBS Nova program from around that time that I ran across some time ago, that now I can't find on-line with a quick search, dealing with the same subject. It asserted that the earth would suddenly enter into an ice age as the result of what it termed a "snow blitz" and that all indications were that this was going to happen soon. Half a century on, we can conclude "I guess not."
In our home library I recall finding a book titled "The Greenhouse Effect" by Harold Bernard published in 1981 that warned of the dangers of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use causing temperatures to soar, producing what he termed a super interglacial period. It's actually a serious, interesting work by a knowledgeable scientist, with lots of historical data on climate, especially the 1930s dust bowl, but, looking back on its predictions now, they were wrong.
Another book in our home library that I read as a kid is "Climates of Hunger" by then U. of Wisconsin professor of meteorology Reid Bryson and Thomas Murray, published in 1977.
Here's the flyleaf copy, a bit long, but it gives you a sense of the book. Most notably, Bryson's fear was a return to a _colder_ climate, not a warmer one and he had plenty of facts and expertise to back up his belief. Alas and alack, he was wrong. At least so far.
"Climate is changing. Parts of our world have been cooling. Rain belts and food-growing areas have shifted. People are starving. And we have been too slow to realize what is happening and why. In recent years, world climate changes have drawn more attention than at any other time in history. What we once called crazy weather just a few years ago is now beginning to be seen as part of a logical and, in part, predictable pattern, an awesome natural force that we must deal with if man is to avoid disaster of unprecedented proportions. Along with drought in some places and floods in others, both caused by changing wind patterns, average temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere have been falling. The old-fashioned winters our grandfathers spoke of are returning. In England, the growing season has already been cut by as much as two weeks. The selection of food crop varieties in both North America and Europe is in for sharp reappraisal, in view of the shrinking frost-free agricultural season and other climatic changes. Climate has always had profound effects upon human history, helping both to build and to destroy great civilizations. Until now, we have not had the knowledge to react intelligently to the signs of shifting climate. Today, even though we remain essentially powerless to affect climate purposefully, we are ready to recognize the signs of change and we are somewhat better able to predict the effects of those changes. This book will help. Here, climatologist Reid A. Bryson and science writer Thomas J. Murray present a broad view of climatic change, examining the past in order to view the future. The prospects are not bright. Bryson, whom Fortune magazine called "the most outspoken perceiver of climatological danger signals" in the United States, says that world temperatures since the sixteenth century have been significantly cooler than those of the first half of the present century. Temperatures now seem to be falling, and many of the weather irregularities we have experienced in recent years are, in great part, an expression of this broad reversal. Unfortunately, we came to view the recent warm period as "normal," and based many of our institutions upon it. The world added a billion people to its population during that time, thanks in part to an unusually favorable agricultural climate. Now we must be able to adjust quickly to climatic changes or face the potentially tragic consequences of inaction. The climatic problems Bryson and Murray speak of are not in some vague geological future. They are upon us now, and we are not prepared."
You might find other gems by https://uta.academia.edu/ChristopherScotese and his animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGf5pZMkjA0 might even fun for Eddie.
Hello, Graham,
For the lulz, you might enjoy watching this episode of "In Search of..." from 1978, narrated by Leonard Nemoy, titled "In Search of the Coming Ice Age."
https://youtu.be/RQRqr9_jw5I?si=9CVuo6Nhq9atxtiH
There was a PBS Nova program from around that time that I ran across some time ago, that now I can't find on-line with a quick search, dealing with the same subject. It asserted that the earth would suddenly enter into an ice age as the result of what it termed a "snow blitz" and that all indications were that this was going to happen soon. Half a century on, we can conclude "I guess not."
In our home library I recall finding a book titled "The Greenhouse Effect" by Harold Bernard published in 1981 that warned of the dangers of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use causing temperatures to soar, producing what he termed a super interglacial period. It's actually a serious, interesting work by a knowledgeable scientist, with lots of historical data on climate, especially the 1930s dust bowl, but, looking back on its predictions now, they were wrong.
Another book in our home library that I read as a kid is "Climates of Hunger" by then U. of Wisconsin professor of meteorology Reid Bryson and Thomas Murray, published in 1977.
Here's the flyleaf copy, a bit long, but it gives you a sense of the book. Most notably, Bryson's fear was a return to a _colder_ climate, not a warmer one and he had plenty of facts and expertise to back up his belief. Alas and alack, he was wrong. At least so far.
"Climate is changing. Parts of our world have been cooling. Rain belts and food-growing areas have shifted. People are starving. And we have been too slow to realize what is happening and why. In recent years, world climate changes have drawn more attention than at any other time in history. What we once called crazy weather just a few years ago is now beginning to be seen as part of a logical and, in part, predictable pattern, an awesome natural force that we must deal with if man is to avoid disaster of unprecedented proportions. Along with drought in some places and floods in others, both caused by changing wind patterns, average temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere have been falling. The old-fashioned winters our grandfathers spoke of are returning. In England, the growing season has already been cut by as much as two weeks. The selection of food crop varieties in both North America and Europe is in for sharp reappraisal, in view of the shrinking frost-free agricultural season and other climatic changes. Climate has always had profound effects upon human history, helping both to build and to destroy great civilizations. Until now, we have not had the knowledge to react intelligently to the signs of shifting climate. Today, even though we remain essentially powerless to affect climate purposefully, we are ready to recognize the signs of change and we are somewhat better able to predict the effects of those changes. This book will help. Here, climatologist Reid A. Bryson and science writer Thomas J. Murray present a broad view of climatic change, examining the past in order to view the future. The prospects are not bright. Bryson, whom Fortune magazine called "the most outspoken perceiver of climatological danger signals" in the United States, says that world temperatures since the sixteenth century have been significantly cooler than those of the first half of the present century. Temperatures now seem to be falling, and many of the weather irregularities we have experienced in recent years are, in great part, an expression of this broad reversal. Unfortunately, we came to view the recent warm period as "normal," and based many of our institutions upon it. The world added a billion people to its population during that time, thanks in part to an unusually favorable agricultural climate. Now we must be able to adjust quickly to climatic changes or face the potentially tragic consequences of inaction. The climatic problems Bryson and Murray speak of are not in some vague geological future. They are upon us now, and we are not prepared."