Global Warming Heat

This is a good as time as any to comment on the global warming debate. Recent days have seen some fairly hysterical mutual abuse between the two camps who have even gone so far as to associate themselves with the politics of the left and right.

I want you to think about what I just said. How can an issue of science have anything whatsoever to do with your political ideas? That a conservative senator chose to hire a staffer to locate sources that challenged the deluge of pro warming material that is at least as sloppy as any on the other side of the debate is still a necessary public service.

At least I know that the more egregious nonsense will be challenged as they should be.

The debate is now descending to the juvenile art of labeling.

What I must remind everyone is that we are living in a climatic era rightly named the Holocene. Our era has demonstrated a temperature range of variability of about two degrees. Over and over again we have warmed up to present conditions and sometimes a bit higher, before tumbling back as much as two degrees. This channel has been good for ten thousand years and there is no suggestion that it ever varied out of that range, including the little ice age.

I was hopeful that the present warm spell could be maintained as happened during the medieval warm period. It chose not to on the basis of the past twelve months. We have lost a degree as you may have well noticed.

All things been equal we have returned fully to lousy weather for decades. An equally fast advance in warming is an unprecedented climate event in terms of our knowledge, while a fast chilling such as we just experienced is not. In other words a quick recovery is out of the question while an additional drop is not.

Neither side has bothered to put the debate in the perspective of the Holocene which leaves nothing to debate at all.

I have argued ample reasons for the existence of the Holocene, but that is unimportant inasmuch as it clearly exists and is the subject of several earlier posts.

It appears that the Holocene exhibits natural governors that are able to keep the climate well channeled. We have just watched a forty year accumulation of heat be handily discharged into Arctic with minimal effect. I imagine if it got far too cold that the gulf stream would sharply strengthen or the Pacific would do something.

A year ago I was prepared to give the global warming hypothesis a chance. All the Earth had to do was maintain the temperature regime. It did not.