We Desperately Need Global Warming

This is the time of year humans traditionally worried, in the Northern Hemisphere, that the world would come to an icy end.  That is, the sun would cease to warm us up again so we had to do various magic spells to save us from the jaws of the great wolf Fenrir. There was also the Dragon of the North as well as the Ice Queen and creatures like Ice Giants to worry about. Fixing them so we could have summer come back was literally life and death.

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Well, today, we are told that the real fearful thing is roasting to death.  Yes, the earth will warm…some day.  Right now, all this month, we have had record cold, day after day, well below freezing.  The Hudson River is frozen.  All the small streams in the mountains here are clogged with thick ice.  It has been extremely cold, so cold, I think I should light a huge bonfire and make more CO2 so it will warm up faster!

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Throughout the entire ‘climate change’ argument, I have been struck by how bizarre this whole business has become.  That is, up until this last few dozen years, sane  people who lived in the Northern Hemisphere’s northern parts, prayed for it to get WARMER.  Not colder!  I can recall no mythology or culture celebrating making the planet colder.  There have been myths about making it too warm.  That is, myths about the sun burning up the planet due to humans driving the sun’s chariot, for example.

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These myths are all about restoring the old status quo.  A main theme of humanity is, we love status quo situations….up to a point.  That is, we want winter to go away as fast as possible.  We endure winter, we don’t ask for more winter.  We celebrate the end of winter with the Vernal Equinox which is a very important time, that is, Easter.  We are reborn.  Just as winter is always viewed as Death.

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So here we are, hearing many people yell that Winter is good and Summer is evil.  This causes me to itch a bit, because when I was hit by lightning as a child, I discovered that things can be turned inside out and upside down and all things are literally reversed.  Whenever I notice this in rhetoric or beliefs, it causes me to pause and look twice.  The fact that our ‘betters’ have chosen to run by us, these warnings that the planet is too warm, right at the Winter Solstice no longer baffles me.

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They did this because this entire topic is driving them insane.  Without realizing how insane this quest was, they deliberately chose to conduct this fabulous meeting at the exact same timeframe that everyone in the Northern half of the planet is most worried, in an instinctual way, about the world freezing to death and all of us dying.  This is our Dark Ice Age Fear that is enormous.  I know very few people who are truly emotionally worried about roasting to death in winter.  I know many people who fear freezing to death in winter.

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We evolved huge brains very rapidly in the last 2 million years thanks to the hammer of Ice and the anvil of Drought caused by the Ice Ages.  The Ice Ages saw oceans retreat and less rain fell. And the habitable landmasses shrank in size as immense glaciers covered much of the planet’s northern hemisphere.  Now, back to extremes: there are opposites.  Up versus down.  In versus out.  Black versus white, etc.

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Now, if the planet during the Ice Ages had less ocean water and more water locked in vast ice sheets, and was also drier, then I would suggest the novel idea that global warming will lead to higher oceans, very little water locked into ice and…more rain.  That is, the earth’s landmasses will, for the most part, be wetter?  This is very possible, not unlikely.  That is, if there were to be no humans to interfere, the natural course would be for more plants due to more rain.

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There is one problem here: humans evolved during the Ice Ages which were cold and dry, not warm and wet.  We domesticated grasses like wheat, barely, rice and corn, for example.  And sugar cane, etc.  We eat grass eating mammals, too.  We are the Grass People.  We love grasses, we love open plains where grass grows and grass eating mammals graze and we harvest the grasses and eat the grazers.  We want more grass, not less.

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Indeed, the real problem as I see it is, the remaining jungles are being cut down so we can graze more grass eating mammals or grow rice or sugar cane, etc.  This, in turn, is a dry climate ecology, not a wet climate ecology.  Due to our desire to have more and more grasses and grazers, we are spreading deserts due to overgrazing and overfarming grass crops.  Now, on to more chatter about the failed Copenhagen meetings and how this reveals our insane desire to keep a status quo going no matter what:

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Leading Climate Scientist James Hansen on Why He’s Pleased the Copenhagen Summit Failed, “Cap and Fade,” Climategate and More

AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what’s meant by “cap and trade.”

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JAMES HANSEN: Cap and trade, they attempt to put a cap on different sources of carbon dioxide emissions. They say there’s a limit on how much a given industry in a country can emit. But the problem is that the emissions just go someplace else. That’s what happened after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace. You know, the Europeans thought they actually reduced their emissions after Kyoto, but what happened was the products that had been made in their countries began to be made in other countries, which were burning the cheapest form of fossil fuel, so the total emissions actually increased.

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AMY GOODMAN: Let me play an excerpt of what the Australian scientist Tim Flannery says. He was speaking on Democracy Now! earlier this year in defense of cap and trade.

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TIM FLANNERY: Look, cap and trade, by itself, is not enough, but it is essential in terms of these international negotiations. And one way of showing that is to look at the alternatives. Just say the US went with a carbon tax. That would leave the President in a position where he’d be going to Copenhagen and saying, “Look, we’ve got a carbon tax, but we’ve got no idea really what it’s going to do in terms of our emissions profile.” So, countries would just say, “Well, what are you actually pledging to? What are you—how are you going to deal with your emissions?” You know, the only method, really, to allow countries to see transparently what other countries intend to do and then share the burden equally is through a cap-and-trade system. So it’s not enough to deal with emissions overall, but it is an essential prerequisite for any global deal on climate change.

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AMY GOODMAN: The Australian scientist Tim Flannery. Dr. Hansen?

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JAMES HANSEN: Well, I guess I would turn Krugman’s comment around and say Tim is a great biologist, but he hasn’t looked at the data on emissions and the effect of a cap with offsets. In fact, it does not decrease emissions. And that’s one reason, in my book, I say that I’m going to update the graphs every month and every year, just showing what’s really happening, because, in fact, you have to actually decrease the emissions.

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And the only way that will happen is if the price of the fossil fuels is gradually rising so that the alternatives—energy efficiency, renewable energies, nuclear power, the things that can compete with fossil fuels—begin to be cost-competitive. That’s the only way it will work.

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The bankers ran circles around the poor scientists.  The scientists have been harnessed to the Chariot of the Greeds.  That is, the rich wanted something new to exploit.  The scientists want things to remain the same.  The rich want more power and the scientists want things to remain the same.  See a pattern here?  Further, the Chariot of the Greeds want to have more of everything!  They want things to grow!  Something has to grow.

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A number of astute commentators are noting that just as we hit the Hubbert Oil Peak about this year or so, during the last 3 years, the people who want infinite wealth and power have been in a tizzy, trying to find something that can grow despite the Hubbert Oil Peak killing modern industrial growth.  This caused a convergence with scientists scared of the results of human consumption of fossil fuels with greedy jerks seeking greater wealth.  They chose this very stupid pollution trading game as the ‘no pain’ solution to these divergent problems.

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That is, we are supposed to ship our pollution out of the northern, icy areas and move them elsewhere (to hot places, of course!).  This has been done to some degree.  Workers in colder, northern places like Michigan, are being impoverished and destroyed and even driven from their homes, as their jobs move to places like hot Mexico or hot Southern China or hot India.  By 2025, I am betting 90% of all auto manufacturing will be nearer the equator rather than in the temperate zones. Northern Europe and the US will see virtually no more auto manufacturing at all.

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That is, if the cap and trade  business is imposed, this is inevitable.  Already, cars made in warm places where the factories are not heated and the workers don’t need heat to stay alive, will drive out those auto makers who have this greater overhead cost.  As the world gets colder thanks to the bankers and scientists stopping warming, the ability for any northern country to manufacture anything will collapse since they must burn something to stay warm during the increasingly colder winters the scientists and bankers seem bent on imposing on the northern parts of the planet!

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Speaking of which, time to take a good look at this planet of ours, from Getty Images – Transparent Globe — Southern Hemisphere has an image of the planet as if it were ‘see through’.  We can see that the Southern Hemisphere has a third of Africa, most of South America and Antarctica and Australia.  These are all set far apart from each other and are evenly spaced.

Note that wide oceans separate the much warmer continents from frozen Antarctica.  None of these areas surrounding Antarctica had great ice sheets cover them at any point during the entire Ice Ages.  The high Andes did form glaciers but these didn’t cover all of Brazil, for example.  Now, let’s look at the Northern Hemisphere.  I show where the Ice Age glaciation covered land masses:

Several matters come instantly to mind: the landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere are of much greater square milage than the Southern Hemisphere.  And these are all very close to the North Pole unlike the Southern Hemisphere which is moving literally away from the South Pole, heading northwards.  Not only that, the thing the Northern Hemisphere must fear the most, by far, is a return of these Ice Ages!

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That is, the ice will cover about 50% of the Northern Hemisphere if we get another Ice Age.  A mile thick, too, not some piddling little bit of snow.  This northern zone which could be locked in ice happens to be the same parts of the earth that will see more rain if it warms up.  The white parts of my hemisphere here could be called ‘the future rain zones’ in global warming.  That is, far from becoming desert, the ice that remains from the last Ice Age will lead to an increase in verdant growth, especially forests.

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That is, if we don’t turn it all into grasslands to graze our animals and grow things we like to eat!  During the last Ice Age, the Sahara desert was not a desert at all but was open grasslands.  The verdant zone was shoved that far south.  The now-arid regions of the southern US and Mexico was also very verdant.  Now, it is also turning to desert as the rain zone moves northwards as the planet warms.

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Now, one can certainly call the frozen parts of Canada, Russia and the US a ‘desert’ since it is not verdant at all and doesn’t even get all that much moisture.  It is white with snow because the snow doesn’t melt very much, most of the year.  I will suggest that if the verdant zone moves northwards some more, this will lead to some of the greatest landmasses moving from frozen desert to verdant forest and longer growing seasons.

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Normally, when this happens, all the plants and animals and even humans migrate along with the planetary changes.  But we now have artificial borders and this can’t be done except very painfully via wars and other events.  The problem with the scientists keeping the status quo is due to it being impossible with the immense human biomass of this planet.  What is worse is, the scientists know this perfectly well.  But are now very inhibited from talking about Chinese-style birth controls.  Back to the Democracy Now interview with Hansen:

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Leading Climate Scientist James Hansen on Why He’s Pleased the Copenhagen Summit Failed, “Cap and Fade,” Climategate and More

JAMES HANSEN: Well, there are tipping points in the climate system, where we can push the system beyond a point where the dynamics begins to take over. For example, in the case of an ice sheet, once it begins to disintegrate and slide into the ocean, you’ve passed the point where you can stop it. So that’s what we have to avoid.

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I would suggest that if this were 28,000 BC, Mr. Hansen’s distant ancestor stood on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea and said this very same thing.  ‘We depend on those mastodons and aurochs to stay alive!  But the glaciers are melting!  We are DOOMED, I say, DOOMED!’

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Yes, the Ice Age civilization of lots of reindeer, giant oxen, cave bears, lions, etc. all came crashing to an end.  I would also suggest that for about 10,000 years, Europe became a deserted wasteland for humans and trees grew unrestrained throughout the regions vacated by the giant glaciers.  Meanwhile, humans had to adapt to all this and they did it by domesticating the smaller grazing creatures and by eating the seeds of grass plants.

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Another tipping point is in the survival of species. As we begin to put pressure on species and move the climate zone so that some of the species can’t survive because they can only live within certain climate parameters, because species depend upon each other, you can drive an ecosystem such that when some species go extinct, then the entire ecosystem will collapse. So you don’t want to push the system that far.

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The prehistoric Hansen probably lectured his fur-wearing tribe about how it is now impossible for the great Ice Age beasts to move about the landscape which was no longer hard permafrost but was melting!  These animals were all disappearing due to the environment becoming warm, wet and soft instead of cold and hard as rock!  Oh, the end of the world!

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Instead of mosses and lichens, flowers were blooming!  Instead of stunted willows and thin aspen, there were this weird oak trees and other hardwoods that were very difficult to cut with a stone axe!  Instead of open plains, Europe became this dense, dark forest.  Yuck!  Different as hell.

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And these tipping points are not hypothetical. We know from the earth’s history that these have happened in the past, especially when we’ve had large global warmings. We’ve driven more than half the species on the planet to extinction. And then, over hundreds of thousands and millions of years, new species come into being. But for any time scale that we can imagine, we would be leaving a much more desolate planet for our children and grandchildren and future generations. So we don’t want to pass those tipping points.

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HAHAHA.  The prehistoric Hansen has taught his progeny well.  So, it is only warming that does this?  We need to fear only warming planet systems?  Wow, someone should alert the extinct dinosaur populations!  A very funny thing here: we humans came from proto-monkeys that evolved during a period when the planet was over 5 degrees warmer than today!  Imagine that!

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Back then, monkey ancestors of ours could swing from tree to tree through verdant jungles from Africa all the way to China!  Wow!  But during the Ice Ages, the only simian or monkey creatures able to venture into most of Eurasia were humanoid species like Neanderthals and of course, the real killers of things: humans.

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AMY GOODMAN: And how do you know that we are headed in that direction?

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JAMES HANSEN: Yeah.

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AMY GOODMAN: What, in your work, has told to this?

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JAMES HANSEN: Well, in the case, say, of the ice sheets and sea level, we see. We began in 2002 to get this spectacular data from the gravity satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth with such a high precision that you can get the mass of the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheets. And what we see is that in 2002 to 2005, we were losing mass from Greenland at a rate of about 150 cubic kilometers per year. Well, now that’s doubled to about 300 cubic kilometers per year. And likewise, the mass loss from Antarctica has also doubled over that time period.

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So we can see that we’re moving toward a tipping point where those ice sheets will begin to disintegrate more rapidly, and sea level will go up. And that’s one of the bases, and others, for saying that a safe level of carbon dioxide is actually less than what we have now. It’s—

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Let’s take another look at this very unruly and unstable planet.  Both Mr. Hansen as well as his prehistoric forefather find it very annoying that this planet has an ever-changing landmass as well as climate.  So, let’s go back to the beginning of the Grass Eater Era, that is the Mammalian Age.  Even more than today, the landmasses were maldistributed across only part of the planet.  In that case, it was and East/West split with most of the planet’s landmasses on the ‘Eastern’ side of the planet.

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Plate Tectonic Reconstructions at UTIG

40 million years ago, it was very warm.  note that much of the same parts of this planet that were near the North Pole back then, are still there, today.  But much of the Southern Hemisphere was hiking northwards, rapidly.  In the case of India, very rapidly.  This northwards hike has ground down greatly due to hitting other landmasses.  Antarctica had no ice 40 million years ago. But starting at 33 million years, it suddenly began to ice over.  During this time frame, grazing animals evolved very rapidly and moved out of forests and began eating grasses.

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Grasses are very, very hard to digest and have silica in each leaf and evolving a way of digesting and chewing this food meant there was a time delay between the end of the dinosaurs and the change from forest to dry grasslands feeding huge herds of grass eating mammals.  These grass eaters, by the way, evolved this thing called ‘hooves’.  Hooves are most important for grass growing for this breaks up the topsoil and prevents roots crowding out new seeds.  As a person who has grazed horses, sheep and cattle over fields, it is pretty clear how hooves chop up the soil and keep it ‘breathing’ so the grass can grow better.

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By the way, to keep things in perspective, here is the planet 450 million years ago: like today, most of the continents seem drawn towards crashing into each other for some reason.  Not that Canada and part of North America are near a bit of Siberia and the Baltic states while all the other continents are upside down and smashed into each other.  And Afghanistan/Kazakhstan is off by itself…hahaha.  Some things seem eternal…Anyway, China is jammed up next to Africa and Venezuela…seems like what is happening politically today…rather funny.

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Anyway, both the Prehistoric Hansen and the modern one must hate this map.  So many weird things evolved due to this map…odd sea creatures and of course, some even crept only the land and began evolving there!  Imagine that!  Status quo, goodbye, baby!

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PLATES Project, UTIG – 450 Ma – Late Ordovician

Now for a more fun map: 100 million AD: 100 m.y. into the Future

Californians better beg for lots of global warming!!!  San Francisco will be around Anchorage, Alaska!  LA will be next to Juneau, Alaska!  Brrrrr.  This map was altered by  myself.  The plan is for hot, hot Australia to go flying northwards just like California until it becomes part of Siberia!  I think it will careen into Japan and form a new Mediterranean Sea-like body of water.  So I colored my changes in red.  Either way, if most of the world’s landmasses are moving violently more or less to the north and most will be above the equator leaving nearly the entire southern hemisphere open ocean except for part of South America and Antarctica, this means that we better have a very warm planet by then!!!!

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That is, we should have it about 5 degrees warmer than today.  Like say, 40 million years ago.  Now, this is the ‘horror scenario’ of the global warming warnings.  That is, we are all not going to evolve, we will all die if this happens.  Of course, if we go into another Ice Age, we will almost certainly all die…like, freeze to death.  And the battles over non-iced lands will be very ferocious and all the cute warm weather species in the north will die.  Of course.

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And this is the usual Scylla and Charybdis choices: either we are eaten by the many-headed global warming monster or by the frigid whirlpool creature.  That is, we have two choices: to get warmer or get cooler.  I would strongly suggest that cooler is more dangerous since we are seeing almost all the parts of the planet with lifeforms heading northwards!  But then, this is looking at the long, long, long rage forecast, of course.  Assuming, we still have a sun 100 million years from now.

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