Climate Change II - Is Global Warming really a bad thing?

As I wrote about last week, one of my traits is that I tend to question assumptions. An assumption is an idea that you take for granted or accept without proof. Our lives are full of assumptions. For example, I used to assume that when I got a message from my servers that the backup was successful, that indeed the backup was good. However, I later encountered a situation where I needed to recover some files from a supposedly good backup only to discover the backup had not really been successful. This is why most network administrators verify backup operations by periodically doing restores.

The fact is, some of our assumptions are not as reliable or absolute as we think. And sometimes our confidence in our knowledge of an area or our skills makes us a little cocky. We stop considering new ideas or questioning the way we have "always done it." Sometimes the result of an ill-considered assumption can be disastrous. That's why it's essential to keep an open mind and learn to question your assumptions.

But before you can question your assumptions, you must first identify what they are. And this is usually harder than you think. It's hard to remember that your perspectives and opinions are not necessarily true, no matter how undeniable they may seem to you. The first step in the innovative process is to dig out these assumptions with some leading questions.

There are some assumptions we need to address in the Climate Change debate. For instance we assume that the current climate is the norm. What if this is not really the case. What if the current climate is actually the aberration and we are retuning to a normal climate? This leads to the question of what if there is no such thing as a "normal climate"? What if the climate needs to be a some sort of cyclic process of heating and cooling to maintain the weather engine we depend on?

One of the big tenets of those who practice the anti-capitalist, anti-technology, anti-individual religion of ecodeism is that the climate changes experienced are bad. We listen to the supposed changes that will take place if the Earth continues to warm up and assume that those changes are indeed a bad thing. After all, the flooding of coastal cities, where most people live, due to ice cap melting sure doesn't sound like a good event, especially for those people that live there. Of course, that depends on how much flooding those coastal cities get. Those estimates appear to be all over the place; I've read over time that the average sea level will rise from a couple of inches to many feet. Besides how high the flooding gets, it is also how quickly the flooding happens. A few feet of worldwide flooding over a days would be very detrimental. However, only the most extreme models and extreme movies predict this kind of flooding. The reality is the IPCC's latest estimate is 7-23 inches, which frankly does not seem an unmanageable amount to adjust to over the next 100 years.

But global warming would also extend the agricultural year and open up a lot of land in the northern US, Canada and Siberia that is frozen tundra to be used for farming. If we were farming and grazing on grasslands that are inhospitable now, but would be useful after warming, we may not need to cut down rain forests to grow food and raise cattle. This sounds like a good thing to me. So, right away, we see that climate change is not all bad. We have questioned our assumption and discovered that there are trade-offs and some of the results are positive.

You might counter that I am just speculating. But I am not. I recommend you read J. R. Dunn's essay, "Resisting Global Warming Panic," especially his exposition of the:

"medieval warm period, more commonly known as the Little Climatic Optimum (LCO), a period stretching roughly from the 10th to the 13th centuries, in which the average temperature was anything from 1 to 3 degrees centigrade higher than it is today. (emphasis added)

• How warm was it during the LCO? Areas in the Midlands and Scotland that cannot grow crops today were regularly farmed. England was known for its wine exports.
  
• The average height of Britons around A.D. 1000 was close to six feet, thanks to good nutrition. The small stature of the British lower classes (and the Irish) later in the millennium is an artifact of lower temperatures. People of the 20th century were the first Europeans in centuries to grow to their 'true' stature - and most had to grow up in the USA to do it.
• In fact, famine - and its partner, plague - appears to have taken a hike for several centuries. We have records of only a handful of famines during the LCO, and few mass outbreaks of disease. The bubonic plague itself appears to have retreated to its heartland of Central Asia.
• The LCO was the first age of transatlantic exploration. When not slaughtering their neighbors, the Vikings were charting new lands across the North Atlantic, one of the stormiest seas on earth (only the Southern Ocean - the Roaring 40s - is worse). If you tried the same thing today, traveling their routes in open boats of the size they used, you would drown. They discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and a new world even beyond, where they found grape vines, the same as in England.
• The Agricultural Revolution is not widely known except among historians. Mild temperatures eased land clearing and lengthened growing seasons. More certain harvests encouraged experimentation among farmers involving field rotation, novel implements, and new crops such as legumes. While the thought of peas and beans may not thrill the foodies among us, they expanded an almost unbelievably bland ancient diet as well as providing new sources of nutrition. The result was a near-tripling of European population from 27 million at the end of the 7th century to 70 million in 1300.
• The First Industrial Revolution is not widely known even among historians. Opening the northern German plains allowed access to easily mined iron deposits in the Ruhr and the Saarland. As a result smithies and mills became common sights throughout Europe. Then came the basic inventions without which nothing more complex can be made - the compound crank, the connecting rod, the flywheel, followed by the turbine, the compass, the mechanical clock, and eyeglasses. Our entire technical civilization, all the way down to Al Gore's hydrogenmobile, has its roots in the LCO.

But temperatures started crashing in the late 13th century, after which came the Great Plague, killing a third to half the population of Europe."

So let us suppose two things: first that global warming really is occurring and human attention to it can reverse it, and second, that we do reverse it. Are we then to agree that a cooler earth really is in our best interests? Why?

I've always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won't stay the same. Even if everyone were to agree that the globe really is warming, can we please see some scientifically-sound documentation that it is a bad thing that needs to be stopped?

Before you point out specific areas where global warming will cause damage, let it be known I too have read articles explaining the prospects of increased desertification and other warming-related effects, such as the extinction of some species (although, Darwinian philosophy says they will either adapt or were not fit to be alive, anyway). But the thrust of my question, might it turn out to be a good thing, is oriented not in micro-climates here and there, but on the net overall effect worldwide. For every hectare turned to new desert, would there be a hectare turned to verdancy, especially land newly useful for agriculture when it wasn't before? Is there really a downside to the extension of the growing season is more northern and southern latitudes? After all, certain commercial grains can now be grown in Iceland, which couldn't be done only 20 years ago. In the literature I've read on warming, potential positive effects seem to either be ignored or glossed over.

Again, the issue cannot be maintaining a climatic status quo, since that wasn't the case even before humanity's earliest known ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, walked around more than six million years ago. The earth "rests" only briefly between periods of cooling then warming. So it's warming now. Is that worse than cooling? Answering that question might give some balance to the political debates on the issue.