Blast from the past.

1982 to be exact.  In catastrophic blasts between March 28 and April 4 the El Chichon volcano in southeastern Mexico left 1,900 people dead and destroyed millions of dollars of crops.  Not the first time a volcano has rumbled awake and smacked humans up-side their heads.  Not the first time a volcano has done something else as well - affected the climate.  As much as 10 million tons of sulphur dioxide were blasted into the atmosphere.  The ash circled the globe quickly, dropping global temperatures as much as a degree F. Temperatures in the stratosphere dropped and remained at lower than average levels for 7 years after the eruption.  Fortunately for various living things, especially third world farmers, the greatest weather affects were ameliorated by the development of a powerful El Nino within weeks of the eruption.

Since the earth really doesn't care about environmentalists, it has been changing its own weather for millions of years without any contribution from humans.  Volcanoes are a prime example of that:

 "The sun was dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months; each day it shone for about four hours; and still this light was only a feeble shadow; the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes."  Michael the Syrian, 536 A.D.

"During this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness. and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.  Procopius of Caesarea, 536 A.D.

Documents for the period of 535 - 536 A.D. speak of the sun being obscured by a "dry fog", summer frosts, widespread crop failures in Europe, drought and famine in China.   Tree rings reflect poor growth, and ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica contain highly elevated levels of sulfuric acid dust.  A single massive eruptive event, and the climate was drastically affected.

1816 was "The Year Without a Summer", the "Poverty Year", and "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death", created by the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.  Killing frosts and snow storms in May and June in Eastern Canada and New England caused wide-spread crop failures, and Pennsylvania lakes and rivers were still iced in July and August.  Populations plummeted, with farm loss forcing the first major migration to the American mid-west from the north-east.  Artist J.M.W. Turner captured the atmospheric affects in his paintings:

And incessant rainfall during a nasty summer trapped a vacationing group inside during their Swiss holiday, leading to a contest to write the scariest story.  The winner, by a young Mary Shelley, was "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus".

At least 6 volcanic eruptions are known to have caused summer anomalies in the last 2,000 years:

Kuwae - 1452
Huaynaputine - 1600
Krakatoa - 1883
Novarupta - 1912
Pinatubo - 1991

In reality, these were small eruptions compared to others that predated written history.  Roughly 75,000 years ago, the Toba Caldera in Sumatra erupted with a force 3500 times greater than that of Tambora.  An eruption of that magnitude can cool the globe 5 to 9 degrees F for years.  The sulphur aerosol is more than the atmosphere can absorb.  An earth that was already in a cooling cycle can be pushed into an Ice Age, or, at minimum, a long cold cycle, devastating for agriculture. 

It wasn't the first time Toba changed the climate.  788,000 years ago a Toba eruption coincided with the advent of a warm period.  And a Toba-level eruption would create major temperature anomalies today:

Volcanoes capable of these sorts of eruptions are very much still around and rumbling - Yellowstone National Park sits in the caldera of a still active mega-volcano.  Thousands of years are but a blink in the history of the earth.   And all "The sky is falling!" scurrying around of the "We must stop global climate change!" folks will not and never will matter a whit in the face of the processes that truly affect our climate.

The Data Disagrees

In addition to the polar bear guy being in trouble for what may have been a wee bit of a misrepresentation, NASA says its satellite data isn't matching that used by hyperventilating enthusiasts of global warming to foment their "the sky is falling" philosophy:

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

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The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

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The whole article can be read here.

What I can't figure out is how anybody can think Al Gore is a more appealing source of information than real data is.  Even in college I never drank that much. 

It's Complex and Complicated

So Ted Turner says climate change is “probably the most serious — and, in all fairness, the most complex — problem that humanity has ever faced.”  And: “It is really easy to understand how some people don’t get it, because it’s so complex and complicated.”

Well, Ted Turner may have a bunch of money, but I've never considered him to be the sharpest tool in the shed.  He may know media, but I'm not sure what his science background is.  I know he loves the Civil War, and I appreciate that interest in history, but that's a brief bit of time in the history of the world.  And even with that, I fail to understand how he could have so much money to spend but end up making such mediocre movies out of the Shaara books.  (For goodness sakes hire a makeup artist who can make a realistic beard the next time, dude!)

For Mr. Turner and others who think we don't get it, a few pictures.  First, a graph of temperature variations:

This shows temperature deviation over the last 450,000 years with the 0 point being a mean of temps from 1961 to 1990.  Note where we are at the 0 point - less variation and lower temps than at other periods.  And this chart only covers only a small fraction of geologic time - I chose it because of the possible influence on hominids, i.e, grandpa.

We are currently in an interglacial period.  Once upon a time, roughly 20,000 years ago, we kindof looked like this:

We've looked like that repeatedly.  We'll look like that again.  I don't like cold very much any more and I guarantee that a mile thick ice sheet would have made my current place of residence COLD!  And it probably would have adversely affected land values in PA, NY, MA, etc:

And when there's that much ice, a lot of water is locked up in it, so current guesstimate is that sea levels were about 120 meters lower.  Once terrestrial ice sheets start melting, sea level rises.  And, of course, a whole lot of other things are happening, both as the ice accumulates and as it recedes.  Sea currents change, the earth's crust depresses or rises due to the weight, salinity changes.  These changes are constant, and normal, and have always happened and always will happen until it's time for the planet to cease its complex existence in the universe.

So now it's warmer, and I'm good with that.  It means greater availability of things I love:

And yes, climate change can cause extinctions.  Another graph:

This one shows percentages of living species going extinct in the millions of years prior to now.  And, really, this one is showing low percentages - I've seen theories that there have been waves of extinctions of up to 90% of extant species.  So extinction is a normal part of the earth's cycles.  And really, for all the nuisance deer are, there were once a whole bunch of much more unpleasant critters around.

 

I'm really glad this guy is not around any more.  I'm really, really good with its extinction.  And humans didn't have a doggone thing to do with it.  But humans have been and currently are working very hard to make various species extinct, and I don't hear much out of the "Save the Whales" folks about it.  These creatures are a part of the natural world, just the same as whales, wolves, and other, more warm and fuzzy creatures are.  And I fully support their extinction.

You don't see these pics much, because, well, they're not cute and cuddly.  But the living, natural creature named Variola shown above, aka smallpox, has been a cause of enormous suffering and death, and the fact that it seems to be extinct in nature is rightly celebrated.

So, you see, a lot of us DO get it.  It's just that it's a way more complicated thing than Mr. Turner seems to understand.

And, by the way, if population is such a problem, why are we working so hard to eradicate cancer?  AIDS?  Polio? Why are we spending so much time and funds on vaccines for flu, pneumonia, diphtheria, measles, and other human ailments?  And why, Mr. Turner, didn't you think of the whole population thing before you had five kids?  Was the relationship between sex and pregnancy too complex, too complicated for you to understand?