Global warming not all that bad (July 13)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
I heard a prayer the other day on the radio which went like this: “Thank you, Lord, that we live in a time and in a place where it is warm.”
I wasn’t paying all that much attention — I had been surfing stations in my car — so I don’t know the context of the prayer, or who prayed it. But it got me thinking about all the global warming talk and the people who are worrying about it.
Global warming has been under way for about 10,000 years, melting the great ice sheets of the last glaciation which covered about half of what now is the United States. Global-warming alarmists are fond of showing photos of icebergs calving off glaciers in Alaska, but that has been going on for thousands of years. And the reason glaciers calve is because ice behind them is pushing them forward. We all learned that in grade school.
Without the global warming of the last few millennia, where we live now would be uninhabitable. That would be true of most of the northern United States.
Even a minor interruption in warming can cause severe hardship. The United States, since its founding, has recorded at least one “little ice age” when temperatures dropped. Europe has had more than one of these episodes.
The idea that global warming will bring doom just isn’t born out. Crop yields are up world wide, people live longer — global warming has been a boon to humanity.
The ill effects on life don’t seem to come from warming, but rather from cooling. The geological record is clear — when ice advances, life is buried or driven away.
The fact that the G-8 leaders didn’t come up with more climate doomsday pronouncements may mean people are finally coming around to reality on this subject.
That prayer seems to make more and more sense.
