It Seems Being Truthful About Past Climates Is Difficult
An alert viewer sends us an item from Sky News Australia about melting glaciers in the Swiss Alps that uses the reemergence of things buried 2,000 years ago as proof of unprecedented ‘climate change’
Whereas the obvious conclusion is that it was at least as warm 2,000 years ago if an area has been “iced over since Roman times”, or more exactly since the Dark Ages cooling, but not earlier.
As for the opening “Glaciers in the Swiss Alps are melting faster than ever before”, what possible idea do they have of how fast they melted in 500 BC? Or 14000 BC? Or 900 AD?
But when it comes to climate, you can say just anything. Thinking is harder.
Thus also from our semi-archive, aka February 2025 but covered in much older dust, an item from The Independent tells us that “More than a million years ago, long before our species Homo sapiens emerged, early humans adapted to desert-like conditions.” Indeed.
It’s important to bring your own skepticism to such stories because even though it does admit that “Other things are still unknown about Homo erectus, like if they had a language,” much speculation presented as solid reconstruction emerges from only a handful of bones and rocks.
But surely everyone writing this kind of story, and reading it, gets that the region of, in this case, East Africa was dismally dry or, in scientific speak, “hyperarid” a million years ago despite prattle of unprecedented drought in stories about the last half-century.
At other times it was wet. It got hotter and colder, sometimes suddenly; the paper indeed speaks of “unstable environments”. And yet Al Gore told us that stuff only started recently.
In that vein we also got, via MSN, a patronizing video from Travel Bucketlist called “Debunking Common Myths About Climate Variability”. It’s not obvious why this gloomy condescension is in their wheelhouse given that at the “wacky, whimsical world of TravelBucketList.xyz, where globetrotting is not just a hobby but a way of life” their self-declared “mission” is “to create the ultimate bucket list of travel experiences for adventurous souls like you.”
But let us lend an ear and an eye. Alas, we quickly regret it.
The video starts by informing us that climate variability isn’t ‘climate change’. Then it says a cold winter doesn’t disprove global warming. Which is true, but they could mention that a hot summer doesn’t prove it either.
After which they hit on “Human Activities Don’t Affect Climate Variability”. Which they attempt to rebut by saying it isn’t true.
But how do they explain the obvious pattern of dramatic climate variability before we had any way of affecting it or, in the case of say Homo erectus, a mere “hominin”, before there were humans? Asserting that recent patterns exhibit “unusual variability” without evidence doesn’t really get it done.
At least not if the audience are mentally grown-ups. Admittedly not all alarmists talk this way. But far too many do.
For instance after putting up “Myth 4: Climate Models Are Unreliable” they respond feebly “Yet these models are grounded in decades of scientific research and data” as if it made their conspicuous inadequacies of design and prediction better not worse.
As for “Myth 5: Climate Variability Equally Affects All Regions” it’s not clear whose straw man they’re incinerating here. The one where everyone says their own country or area is warming faster than the average?
The one about uniform relentless sea level rise? In point of fact the extreme range of weather patterns, and changes in weather patterns, is more proof that the global warming theory and the vaunted models are far too simplistic and that actually it has always been the case that things are changing, in both short- and long-term ways that differ from area to area.
Although of course when, say, a glaciation begins or ends there’s a distinct tendency for nearly everywhere to get colder or warmer.
As for their “Coastal regions may experience rising sea levels, whereas arid areas might face prolonged droughts” it would surely be remarkable if a non-coastal area experienced sea levels of any sort, unless you mean one that’s already under water, and if an area did not face prolonged droughts it would be a misuse of the English language to characterize it as “arid”.
By the time they’re telling us immediate drastic measures aren’t the only solution but are “crucial” our patience is exhausted.
So we just sat there when they told us much more research was necessary to confirm what everybody already knows.
See more here climatediscussionnexus
Header image: Lonely Planet
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