Global Warming - Sunday, July 02, 2006

On Jun. 30, 2006 The Toronto Star reported that “Global warming will be the greatest crisis facing humankind in the year 2020, according to a national poll of Canadians …”.

Now, the national poll may be accurate in that it asked Canadians and recorded their answers.

The sad truth is that Canadians are routinely told that Global Warming is a problem, and that it is a human problem. That’s an easy issue to debate. I believe that Canadians are merely parroting what they have been told.

I also believe geologists who tell me that the Wisconsin Ice Sheet was responsible for the sharp about-turn in the Ohio river just NW of Pittsburgh, and that the Wisconsin ice sheet began melting about 11,000 years ago. That is, for the past 11,000 years we have been moving from a 2-mile thick layer of ice over what is now Toronto to power cuts as all the air-conditioners are switched on.

I believe too the geologists, using tools they’ve borrowed from the physicists, who tell me that parts of the Laurentian Shield surrounding Hudson’s Bay are still rebounding from the weight of ice. It’s a slow process, is geology.

There should be no doubt that over the past 11,000 years there has been a trend towards warmer times. 11,000 years is not a blink in the eye of humankind, let alone mammalian-kind, let alone invertebrate-time. It is about 0.000275 PERCENT of the life of our planet.

Whoosh!

Yesterday it rained heavily here in Toronto. Today there is not a trace of cloud on the radar maps. If my time interval is too short I should be screaming that we are all heading for a terrible drought, but hang about and we’ll have another massive thunderstorm next week, part of a major road will be washed out, and we can all scream “flooding!’ at the top of our lungs.

Choose your time interval and place your bets, or start your arguments. But to say “Global Warming” without specifying a time interval is ridiculous.

Part of the debilitating argument is that humans are to blame. And that we humans should do something about it.

That too is an easy argument to demolish. Let’s look at it carefully and logically.

If humans cause Global Warming, then humans must have been doing something thousands of years ago, right?

No? Ah! So you think that it’s not humans as such, but the industrial effect of humans – cars, machines, jet planes and so on. That is to say “The industrial revolution”, but what sparked that? Population growth; no more, and no less.

Humans by themselves can’t cause global warming, but perhaps humans in large numbers have an effect.

If so, then the problem is not humans, but “population growth of humans”, and so the solution would be to reduce and diminish the population and its growth. That will take time, but it could be done.

But it won’t be done, and so we must look at what else will be happening.

Long before the planet’s temperature rises another 1 degree Celsius on average, long before London finally disappears under the waves, we, humans on this planet will have run out of fresh water. We don’t have enough, it’s not in the right places, and we waste it.

Long before massive droughts and floods spark mass migrations, we will have wars about who has the rights to fresh water.

Canadians seem to be concerned about “the environment, pollution and the need for new energy technologies”, somewhat concerned about “health care” and “Quebec separation”

The poll came close to a true concern, but sheered off tangentially with “asked whether the glass is half full or half empty, a whopping 82 per cent took the optimistic view and said half full.

Wrong. Utterly wrong.

Canadians are sandwiched between a large supply of fresh water and a thirsty well-armed nation; well-armed economically as well as in the military sense.

The poll is not looking so far ahead that “it ends up in the realm of science fiction.”

You think not?

Make a chart of population growth over any interval further back from 1900. What do you see?

Now make a chart of temperature rise, from any factual or hypothetical source. What do you see?

Which of the two seems to be out of control?

Population growth alone is capable of sparking a war from each and every misery known to man, from stress, noise, thirst, hunger, space, you name it.

As human numbers rise, tempers flare. Think “road rage” but not on the shoulders of a highway.

Think “Road Rage” across every nation on the planet.

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