Global Cooling

I like contrarians. I also like science, though I am not a scientist and certainly not a devotee of the cult of scientism that holds that whatever theory is possessed of a loud or majority voice is absolutely true. As you know, my one sole reader, I am also far from convinced that climate change has much to do with man-made global warming, that it is unnatural, or that anything can be done about it. I am very suspicious of the science, driven by lobby groups and funded by governments, that links carbon dioxide intimately to global warming.

A certain sort of western liberal at the moment is very prone to slightly psuedoscientific stances. For example, the recent rush to ban plastic bags on environmental grounds runs up against quite a few difficulties. My pal Lou has sent me an indication of some here. I think that a campaign to limit oil-based products and plastic as the oil begins to run out, allied to a nuclear and clean coal energy system would be a good idea.

Moderation, conservation, and restraining ugly things that are just convenient for some but not others is usually a good idea; my first targets would be over large child buggies that do not fold up like they used to, and those silly bags on wheels that everyone now carts around and which create a personal zone around a person as surely as a tail on a dinosaur.

It isn't the case that one has to dodge dinosaur tails on tube platforms or busy streets. There's something you can learn from this blog. What it is increasingly necessary to avoid are the out-of-line-of-sight bags on wheels that I'm sure people really don't need. Oh, and I'd ban overnoisy i-pods too. I had an i-pod once which I liked until I realised that I did no thinking whatsoever, registered no one else, and was not relaxed when it was on. Perhaps that's just me, and if you feel like sending me one, attach it to the usual brick and serve it in the usual way.

I frankly am not convinced by emotional psuedoscience about rubbish tips and choked phantom seals. The latter justifications for banning things seem to my mind to have more to do with people of no faith looking for a new campaign to feel righteous and salve their existential crisis now that smoking has been banned.

Exactly the same sort of fact-free emotional reasoning is employed in another campaign that might have been argued better, against faith schools.

And of course, there's global warming. Thirty three years ago, breathless media reports were not of warming but of cooling. This does not, however, stand as a testimony to the superficiality of journalism, though it is. It illustrates how a perfectly viable theory can be derailed by overearnest and radical backing without scepticism.

The truth is, or rather seems to be, that ice ages tend to follow brief periods of intense global warming. This may be because of the cycles of the Sun, according to those who know the facts of the matter. It may also be because the earth gets hotter in the northern hemisphere, which stops undersea circulation of heat via thermohaline currents, which makes the land and air systems cold. Warming would thus produce temporarily different results in the northern and southern hemispheres, but ultimately tip the world into cooling because the land would become cold.

I am summarising. But how similar is that to what has been happening?

It is also the case that a little ice age in the past six hundred years has been associated with three solar activity 'dips'. The planet is, however, overdue for a bigger one. Recent indications are that global warming has slowed if not stopped, that sunspot activity is at a very unusual minimum, and that temperatures fell very rapidly last year. Be careful though, since the anti-global warming people need funds too and public concern is a good way to get them.

Yet there is a debate to be had officially, and no-one is having it. What is it about the modern world that complicated ideas that might lead to two or three different conclusions have to be invested with moral self-righteousness and used as the basis for either crusade or condemnation?

I think that we are in bigger trouble, and I don't mean the gathered economic troubles around that worsen by the day, than we have accounted for. I think the media is terrible at defining the dimensions of the trouble. I think that a lot of people, especially in the western middle classes, have closed their minds to argument and are refighting some drama of self-importance in their prejudices. And I wonder if we won't just wake up one morning in the near future and find the cupboard is bare, the oil has trickled away, the earth is white with very cold snow where it hasn't become a desert, and we haven't as societies and individuals the independence, moral capital or decency to face the challenge that confronts us.

Then again, it's Friday, which with the summer seems now to be my moment for gloomy posts, so perhaps you, my reader, can discount my anxious thoughts.