Where is the Hot Air Coming From...?
March Recorder Article
By: Mike Doyle, CAGC
Mike Doyle is the President of the CAGC – the
Canadian Association of Geophysical Contractors - representing the business interests of the seismic industry within Canada. The CAGC website may be found at www.cagc.ca.
Hunker down and good luck to all of us. Let’s hope things turn
around by the fall. Already cheap oil has meant that gasoline usage is on the
rise. As well the USA shale producers
are slowing down drilling quickly. For all of us in the industry we need the
market to rebalance itself – lower the supply and increase the demand – perhaps
by this summer it will be closer to balance. It is difficult to listen to too
much doom and gloom so here is something a bit different.
From Investors.com - Warming Alarmists Could Use Lesson On History
Of Climate
By George F. Will – January 7, 2015
We know, because they say
so, that those who think catastrophic global warming is probable and perhaps
imminent are exemplary empiricists. Those who disagree with them are
"climate change deniers" disrespectful of science.
Actually, however,
something about which everyone can agree is that of course the climate is
changing — it always is. And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they
claim about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of
enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human
activity?
Before wagering vast wealth
and curtailments of liberty on correcting the climate, two recent books should
be considered.
In
"The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th
Century," William Rosen explains how Europe's "most widespread and
destructive famine" was the result of "an almost incomprehensibly
complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation."
Early in that century, 10%
of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died, partly because of the
effect of climate change on "the incredible amalgam of molecules that
comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world's food."
In the Medieval Warm Period
(MWP), from the end of the 9th century to the beginning of the 14th, the
Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the last 8,000 years — for
reasons concerning which there is no consensus.
Warming increased the
amount of arable land — there were vineyards in northern England — leading,
Rosen says, to Europe's "first sustained population increase since the
fall of the Roman Empire." The need for land on which to grow cereals
drove deforestation. The MWP population explosion gave rise to towns, textile
manufacturing and new wealthy classes.
Then,
near the end of the MWP, came the severe winters of 1309-1312, when polar bears
could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. In 1315 there was rain for
155 consecutive days, washing away topsoil. Upwards of half the arable land in
much of Europe was gone; cannibalism arrived as parents ate children. Corpses
hanging from gallows were devoured.
Human behavior did not
cause this climate change. Warming caused behavioral change (10 million mouths
to feed became 30 million). Then cooling caused social changes (rebelliousness
and bellicosity) that amplified the consequences of climate, a pattern repeated
four centuries later.
In "Global Crisis:
War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century,"
Geoffrey Parker, a professor at Ohio State, explains how a "fatal
synergy" between climatological and political factors produced turmoil
from Europe to China.
What he calls "the
placenta of the crisis" of that century included "the Little Ice
Age" (LIA) between the 1640s and 1690s. Unusual weather, protracted enough
to qualify as a change in climate, jibed so strongly with political upheavals
as to constitute causation.
Whatever
caused the LIA — decreased sunspot activity and increased seismic activity were
important factors — it caused, among other horrific things,
"stunting" that, Parker says, "reduced the average height of
those born in 1675, the 'year without a summer,' or during the years of cold and famine in the
early 1690s, to only 63 inches: the lowest ever recorded."
In northerly latitudes,
Parker says, each decline of 0.5 degree Celsius in the mean summer temperature
"decreases the number of days on which crops ripen by 10%, doubles the
risk of a single harvest failure, and increases the risk of a double failure
sixfold." For those farming at least 1,000 feet above sea level this
temperature decline "increases the chance of two consecutive failures a
hundredfold."
The
flight from abandoned farms to cities produced "the urban graveyard
effect," crises of disease, nutrition, water, sanitation, housing, fire,
crime, abortion, infanticide, marriages forgone and suicide. Given the ubiquity
of desperation, it is not surprising that more wars took place during the
17th-century crisis "than in any other era before the Second World
War."
By documenting the
appalling consequences of two climate changes, Rosen and Parker validate
wariness about behaviors that might cause changes. The last 12 of Parker's 712
pages of deliver a scalding exhortation to be alarmed about what he considers
preventable global warming.
But
neither book backs those who believe human behavior is the sovereign or even
primary disrupter of climate normality, whatever that is. With the hands that
today's climate Cassandras are not using to pat themselves on the back for
their virtuous empiricism, they should pick up such books.
Perhaps there are
just too many people on this little biosphere in the middle of the universe.
And we do an incredible job of staying alive. Less than 1000 people died
worldwide from SARS. Less than 10,000 died from Ebola. In OECD countries we
have tripled life expectancy in the last couple of hundred years. Even the
hurricane Katrina killed less than 2,000 people. Fossil fuels have made us
safer from the perils of the environment. Oddly we wish to return to some
previous manner of civilization.
From Brainy
Quotes on the Internet:
The real problem is not whether machines think
but whether men do.
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