THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROCESS
(…is a dynamic cyclical one…oscillating between warm and cool…)

The latest broadside in the climate change/global warming battle has just been fired by the United Nations’ -IPCC – (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report on the issue. Unfortunately it’s couched in strident, almost evangelical tones, which seriously misdirects, if not misleads, the focus of attention from the reality of the complexities involved with it.

Worse than that is having eminent scientific minds participating in such alarmist and narrow perspectives about the subject, in an attempt to pin the cause of it solely on humans and their activities, when there are other and very complex realities involved here. Thus they are presenting a distorted and incomplete picture of the situation, and such a distorted and incomplete picture makes taking effective measures… to adapt and to prepare ourselves for the impacts of what such realities will bring…almost useless.

So what are the broader aspects and factors involved here?

First, even the most ignorant flat-earth-society believers understand that global climate change is a reality, and, that it is a dynamic cyclical process oscillating from warm-to-cool-to-warm, again. It’s a process which has been part of our planet’s history since the beginning of its existence, having nothing to do with humans…or their activities.

Second, that process of global climate change occurs on a geologic time scale often spanning several hundreds of thousands years between cycles. Perhaps the best analogy is to describe it as a series of sine waves each having variable length intervals between their peaks and troughs, with their peaks representing the warmest points and their troughs…the coolest. In the past million years we have had four such cycles, that is, glacial and inter-glacial climatic periods, with most of the glacial periods lasting not much over fifty thousand years each, while the inter-glacial (or warm) periods have lasted from one hundred thousand to almost three hundred thousand years each. The last glacial episode ended, or began reversing back to a warming one, some fifty thousand years ago. Based upon the past record for these, it seems we therefore can expect the present warming cycle to continue for another fifty thousand years or so…no matter what we do about reducing emissions, etc..

Third, as to the causes of such a cyclical process with our climate, these appear to be a complex interaction of our planet’s orbital track around the sun (somewhat oval rather than circular), it’s axial tilt, and wobble, along with tectonic plate shifts, and solar flare patterns. Again, humans have nothing to do with that process.

However, how much the human factor contributes to all of that is an open question. That contribution may actually come not just from our activities…but from our numbers instead, and the extreme spike in CO2 levels above and beyond historical levels, may be more about those numbers than we realize. Here’s why: one million years ago there were barely forty five thousand humans on the entire planet. Today…we number over six billion…and counting. Yet, no one, other than Malthus, has ever really considered what the impact of so many numbers of us might have on our planet. Overpopulation overloads the environment in many ways, but…as air-breathing creatures…how much CO2 does such a number of humans contribute to atmospheric levels of it? We have yet to hear of any comprehensive effort being made to calculate that.

In fact, we have yet to hear of a comprehensive effort made to calculate the contribution of ALL sources of CO2, not just in terms of quantity, but as a percentage of the grand total of such emissions, both naturally caused, and human caused. Nor have we yet to hear of any comprehensive efforts made to determine the sum total absorption offsets to all those emissions. So until someone produces such an –accounting- style summary for that there will continue to be a distorted and incomplete picture of what our real environmental situation is, leaving us unable to make effective plans for how we should deal with the impacts resulting from it.

To summarize…climate change is a cyclical process on our planet, and to paraphrase Robert Frost’s – Fog – it creeps forward on cat feet towards us. Nothing we humans do will change that reality. Our contribution to that process, however, both by our numbers and from our activities may actually diminish the length of the current warming period, and accelerate us into the next cooling cycle to follow instead. But whichever way it goes, one thing is certain … just as in previous eras…plants, other creatures, and we humans, will all have to adapt to the impacts of that climatic cyclical process; and, how well all those species adapt to such changes will determine which ones will survive.

The track of the evolutionary process on our planet has shown us how that works. That is…as climate changed over time…plant and animal life changed with it…thus those that will result from that…tomorrow…won’t necessarily resemble those that exist…today.

Such is planet EARTH

CENTURION