Some 40 years ago as a freshman college student, I signed up for a geology course to satisfy the science requirement under my liberal arts course of studies. Having grown up in Texas oil fields, I figured the study of fossils would be more fun than cutting up frogs in a biology lab.
What I didn't anticipate was being required to distinguish feldspar from sandstone. To me, a rock by any name is just another stone. After I had bombed yet another lab exam by my inability to differentiate one rock from another, my dismayed instructor complained, "I thought you would have answered at least one question correctly if you had to lick every sample just to determine which one was salt!"
Despite my total lack of scientific ability, I did learn one thing from that class. In a lecture on the Ice Age, my instructor observed that the ebb and flow of ice sheets over prehistoric North America and Eurasia were often interspersed with thousands of years of warm weather. "In fact," he said, "some of those warm periods lasted for more years than the amount of time between the last advance of ice and today. So for all we know, we may still be in the Ice Age."
That statement is the only thing I remember from any of my classes during that semester, and I've thought of it often during the current debate over global warming.
Global cooling
According to proponents of this Ice Age theory, the earth has been in "an ice house climate"—evidenced by the polar ice caps—for the last 30 million years, with the last advance of the polar ice sheets occurring a mere 18,000 years ago. During most of the last 1 billion years, they say, there were no permanent ice deposits on earth.
Scientists have determined four primary reasons for the advance of prehistoric ice sheets: changing continental positions, uplift of continental blocks, changes in the Earth's orbit, and the reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now some scientists and laymen are worried that increased CO2 emissions over the last 140 years are raising global temperatures.
Andre Illarionov, aide and economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is among those who see a greater threat from global cooling than from global warming. At a week-long annual Houston energy conference sponsored by Cambridge Energy Research Associates in early February, Illarionov ob- served, "Mother Nature's method of mass destruction is actually global cooling, not global warming. In the history of civilization, climatic optimums are associated more with prosperity and progress; ice ages with hardships and catastrophes in human history."
Scientific examination of temperature variations in the last 450,000 years shows "clear cycles, quite substantial climatic cycles" that prove "current global warming is neither unique nor the strongest in the history of earth. The asserted increase in the frequency of extraordinary climatic events in recent years appears unproven," said Illarionov.
Moreover, he said, "The asserted increase in the speed of temperature change in recent years appears also unproven. It is once again not unique, not the strongest in the last 4,000 years."
Russia opposed
Although he stopped short of saying so, Illarionov indicated that Russia, like the US, would not endorse the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. "The Kyoto Protocol is based on technological illusions. It's quite clearly impossible to switch away from hydrocarbons to another energy base in a short period of time, when 81% of the world's energy consumption is hydrocarbons," he said.
It's also based on "false science," said Illarionov. "The variation in global temperature cannot be explained by the variation in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere even in the last 140 years. In the period of the 1940s when the CO2 concentration was falling, the global temperature was rising very sharply. In the 1960s-70s, when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was growing with the highest speed, the global temperature was falling."
The Kyoto Protocol discriminates against low and middle-income economies and is incompatible with wealth accumulation in developed economies, Illarionov said.
"The Kyoto Protocol is unbearably expensive," he said. Compliance costs could run as high as $1.75 quadrillion in 1990 US dollars, "which is approximately 15% of the annual GDP in the affected countries."
To advocate spending that much money on the basis of questionable evidence of something that might not happen, one would almost have to have rocks in his head.
