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Memories of the 28th Century

Political Correctness and the Climate

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Among a wide swath of Americans there are several topics about which disagreement is not permitted; these include: race, gender, religion, disabilities, war, trade, crime, punishment, drugs, climate change, and a variety of other issues. The committee of political purity has looked at these matters and decreed that there is one single opinion permitted for these matters, and straying from the approved opinion is strictly forbidden. For most matters it is simply a matter of people with strong opinions asserting that their opinions are correct, but it changes into the stifling of knowledge, when they assert that their opinions are proven by science, and that the science is “settled science".

By its nature, science is never settled. Scientists constantly look for a better or more complete explanation. When it comes to climatology things are less settled than in many other sciences. Since 1970 the general opinion on the Earth's climate has gone from "pretty stable" to the coming ice age to maybe it's warming to anthropogenic global warming to anthropogenic climate change that will be a disaster by the year 2100. Five distinct levels of concern in just under fifty years. During that period the climate has not changed dramatically; although some people claim that the increase that occurred in average temperature of less than one degree Celsius is dangerous.

It seems that there has been a slight increase in average temperatures, but the change is in line with what one would expect, considering that the Little Ice Age ended just a hundred fifty years ago, and it had a tail that lasted somewhat longer. We shouldn't be surprised that the Earth is becoming a little warmer, because it has been warmer for most of the last ten thousand years and for most of the last hundred thousand years. "The present ice age began 40 million years ago with the growth of an ice sheet in Antarctica, but intensified during the Pleistocene (starting around 3 million years ago) with the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere." The beginning of this era was when Antarctica broke off from South America; thus creating the circumpolar current that prevents the warming of Antarctica. Before that time the Earth was usually considerably warmer than it is now with cold-blooded dinosaurs living in the high latitudes. In the last 30 million years there have been many ice ages separated by interglacial periods. We are in an interglacial period now, but it is impossible to predict with any accuracy how long this period will last. The last serious ice age only ended about twelve thousand years ago, and there have been at least two substantial rises in sea level since then. One sea level rise came about 10,000 BCE and another about 5000 BCE. The first one is uncertain, and there might have just been a steady rise, but about 5000 BCE sea level in the Mediterranean basin rose much faster for a short period of time. During the prior interglacial sea level was about five meters higher than at present, and at the height of the last ice age 20000 YBP sea level was about 120 meters lower than now.

The average temperature of Earth shouldn't be a concern at present, but it is part of a larger concern that some people have over the sustainability of human life and civilization on Earth. Some people think that humans are destroying Earth. These people think that the excess of people will destroy the Earth as a human habitat. If anything Earth is destroying humans, because there are more humans than the Earth can support. Among other animals this situation causes a population crash, and that is probably what is also happening to humans. Among animals, when populations become too dense, disease increase to kill off the excess population, and in some animals they become less tolerant of and more aggressive toward others of their species. In humans more people transmit more diseases to more other people, and new diseases appear, as Ebola broke out the area where it originated. It's only a matter of time until some new or improved disease will break out and travel around the world before the medical professionals can do anything about it. If the disease is sufficiently virulent, then it will kill a substantial part of humanity before it runs out of fresh food.

If humans wish to sustain the species over the long run, then they will ship as many as possible to another planet in the hope that they will survive the disease. But worrying about climate change will not lead to a sustainable Earth.


I am planning to write a book that will correct the mistakes in the climate change community, and the matter of the unsustainability of Earth is central to the matter, and it is central to the philosophy that allows



http://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-lev...d-last-ice-age

Present ice age
http://www.crystalinks.com/iceage.html

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