This post is the third of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the third theme.

Overview

The geological and paleontological evidence overwhelmingly says that today’s average global temperature of about 15 degrees C and CO2 concentrations of 420 ppm are nothing to fret about. Even if they rise to about 17–18 degrees C and 500–600 ppm by the end of the century, it may well balance or improve the lot of mankind.

After all, bursts of civilization during the last 10,000 years uniformly occurred during the red portions of the graph below. The aforementioned river civilizations—the Minoan, the Greco-Roman era, the Medieval flowering, and the industrial and technological revolutions of the present era. At the same time, the several lapses into the dark ages happened when the climate turned colder (blue).

And that’s only logical. When it’s warmer and wetter, growing seasons are longer, and crop yields are better—regardless of the agricultural technology and practices of the moment. And it’s better for human and community health, too—most of the deadly plagues of history have occurred in colder climates, such as the Black Death of 1344–1350..

Yet, the Climate Crisis Narrative employs two deceptive devices which are contradicted by earth’s climate history:

a. Planetary temperatures have been far higher than today, both long ago (over 600 million years) and recently (last 10,000 years) with no doomsday loop occurring.

b.It is claimed global warming is a one-way street from rising GHGs, when in fact higher CO2 concentrations are a consequence and by-product, not a driver and cause, of the current naturally rising temperatures.

Again, the now “canceled” history of the planet knocks the CO2-driver proposition into a cocked hat. During the Cretaceous Period between 145 and 66 million years ago, a natural experiment provided complete absolution for the vilified CO2 molecule. During that period, global temperatures rose dramatically from 17 degrees C to 25 degrees C—a level far above anything today’s Climate Howlers have ever projected.

Alas, CO2 wasn’t the culprit. According to science, ambient CO2 concentrations actually tumbled during that 80-million-year expanse, dropping from 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm on the eve of the Extinction Event 66 million years ago.

3. Climatists weaponize natural events to gain social control for a global agenda. It’s About Power, Not Truth or Humanity.

You would think that this powerful countervailing fact would give the CO2 witch-hunters pause, but that would be to ignore what the whole climate change brouhaha is actually about. That is, it’s not about science, human health and well-being or the survival of planet Earth; it’s about politics and the ceaseless search of the political class and the apparatchiks and racketeers who inhabit the beltway for still another excuse to aggrandize state power.

Indeed, the climate change narrative is the kind of ritualized policy mantra that is concocted over and over again by the political class and the permanent nomenklatura of the modern state—professors, think-tankers, lobbyists, career apparatchiks, officialdom—in order to gather and exercise state power.

The Obvious Exploitation of Natural Events

Indeed, fabrication of false problems and threats that purportedly can only be solved by heavy-handed state intervention has become the modus operandi of a political class that has usurped near-complete control of modern democracy.

In doing so, however, the ruling elites have gotten so used to such unimpeded success that they have become sloppy, superficial, careless and dishonest. For instance, the minute we get a summer heatwave, these natural weather events are jammed into the global warming mantra with nary a second thought by the lip-syncing journalists of the MSM.

Heatwaves

Yet there is absolutely no scientific basis for all this tom-tom beating. In fact, NOAA publishes a heatwave index based on extended temperature spikes, which last more than 4 days and which would be expected to occur once every 10 years based on the historical data.

As is evident from the chart below, the only true heatwave spikes we have had in the last 125 years were during the dust bowl heat waves of the 1930s. The frequency of mini-heatwave spikes since 1960 is actually no greater than it was from 1895 to 1935.

Hurricanes

Likewise, all it takes is a good Cat 2 hurricane and they are off to the races, gumming loudly about AGW. Of course, this ignores entirely NOAA’s own data as summarized in what is known as the ACE (accumulated cyclone energy) index.

This index was first developed by renowned hurricane expert and Colorado State University professor William Gray. It uses a calculation of a tropical cyclone’s maximum sustained winds every six hours. The latter is then multiplied by itself to get the index value and accumulated for all storms for all regions to get an index value for the year as shown below for the past 170 years (the blue line is the seven-year rolling average).

That is to say, hundreds of billions of dollars of insurance coverage were then and still is being written with ACE as a crucial input. Yet, if you examine the 7-year rolling average (blue line) in the chart, it is evident that ACE was as high or higher in the 1950s and 1960s as it is today and that the same was true of the late 1930s and the 1880–1900 periods. [See also Bill Gray: H20 is Climate Control Knob, not CO2]

If global warming were generating more hurricanes as the MSM constantly maintains, the increase would be uniform across all of these subregions, but it’s clearly not. Since the year 2000, for example,

• the Eastern Caribbean has had a modest increase in both tropical storms and higher-rated Cats relative to most of the past 170 years;
• the Western Caribbean has not been unusual at all, and, in fact, has been well below the counts during the 1880–1920 period; and
• the Bahamas/Turks & Caicos region, since 2000, has actually been well weaker than during 1930–1960 and 1880–1900

The actual truth of the matter is that Atlantic hurricane activity is generated by atmospheric and ocean temperature conditions in the eastern Atlantic and North Africa. Those forces, in turn, are heavily influenced by the presence of an El Niño or La Niña in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño events increase the wind shear over the Atlantic, producing a less-favorable environment for hurricane formation and decreasing tropical storm activity in the Atlantic basin. Conversely, La Niña causes an increase in hurricane activity due to a decrease in wind shear.

These Pacific Ocean events, of course, have never been correlated with the low level of natural global warming now underway.

The number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes may also undergo a 50- to 70-year cycle known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. Again, these cycles are unrelated to global warming trends since 1850.

Wildfires

As it happens, the same story is true with respect to wildfires—the third category of natural disasters that the Climate Howlers have glommed onto. But in this case, it’s bad forestry management, not man-made global warming, which has turned much of California into a dry wood fuel dump.

But don’t take our word for it. This comes from the George Soros-funded Pro Publica, which is not exactly a right-wing tin foil hat outfit. It points out that environmentalists had shackled federal and state forest management agencies so much so that today’s tiny “controlled burns” are but an infinitesimal fraction of what Mother Nature herself accomplished before the helping hand of today’s purportedly enlightened political authorities arrived on the scene.

“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change.

We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine—to restabilize in terms of fire.”

Among other proofs that industrialization and fossil fuels aren’t the culprit is the fact that researchers had shown that when California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year. That’s nearly six times the 2010–2019 period, when wildfires burned an average of just 775,000 acres annually in California.

Beyond the untoward clash of all of these natural forces of climate and ecology with misguided government forest and shrubland husbandry policies, there is actually an even more dispositive smoking gun, as it were.

To wit, the Climate Howlers have not yet embraced the apparent absurdity that the planet’s purportedly rising temperatures have targeted the Blue State of California for special punishment. Yet when we look at the year-to-date data for forest fires, we find that unlike California and Oregon, the US as a whole is now experiencing the weakest fire years since 2010.

You just can’t go from 2.7 million burned acres in 2010 to 7.2 million acres in 2012, then back to 2.7 million acres in 2014, then to 6.7 million acres in 2017, followed by just 3.7 million acres in 2020—and still argue along with the Climate Howlers that the planet is angry.

National fire data year to date:

On the contrary, the only real trend evident is that on a decadal basis during recent times, average forest fire acreage in California has been slowly rising, owing to the above-described dismal failure of government forest management policies. But even the mildly rising average fire acreage trend since 1950 is a rounding error compared to the annual averages from prehistoric times, which were nearly 6 times greater than during the most recent decade.

Nor is this lack of correlation with global warming just a California and US phenomenon. As shown in the chart below, the global extent of drought, measured by five levels of severity, with brown being the most extreme, has shown no worsening trend at all during the past 40 years.

Global Extent of Five Levels Of Drought, 1982–2012

Public Discourse Contaminated by Imaginary Climate Crisis Notion

This brings us to the gravamen of the case. To wit, there is no climate crisis whatsoever, but the AGW hoax has so thoroughly contaminated the mainstream narrative and the policy apparatus in Washington and capitals all around the world that contemporary society is fixing to commit economic hari-kari.

That’s because, contrary to the phony case that the rise of fossil fuel use after 1850 has caused the planetary climate system to become unglued, there has been a massive acceleration of global economic growth and human well-being. One essential element behind that salutary development has been the massive increase in the use of cheap fossil fuels to power economic life.

The chart below could not be more dispositive. During the pre-industrial era between 1500 and 1870, real global GDP crawled along at just 0.41% per annum. By contrast, during the past 150 years of the fossil fuel age, global GDP growth accelerated to 2.82% per annum–or nearly 7 times faster.

This higher growth, of course, in part resulted from a larger and far healthier global population made possible by rising living standards. Yet, it wasn’t human muscle alone that caused the GDP level to go parabolic, as per the chart below.

It was also due to the fantastic mobilization of intellectual capital and technology. One of the most important vectors of the latter was the ingenuity of the fossil fuel industry in unlocking the massive trove of stored work that Mother Nature extracted, condensed, and salted away from the incoming solar energy over the long warmer and wetter eons of the past 600 million years.

Yes, that dramatic rise in prosperity in generating fossil fuel consumption has given rise to a commensurate increase in CO2 emissions. But contrary to the Climate Change Narrative, CO2 is not a pollutant!

As we have seen, the correlated increase in CO2 concentrations—from about 290 ppm to 415 ppm since 1850—amounts to a rounding error in both the long-trend of history and in terms of atmospheric loadings from natural sources.

As to the former, concentrations of less than 500 ppm are only recent developments of the last ice age, while during prior geologic ages concentrations reached as high as 2400 ppm.

Likewise, the oceans contain an estimated 37,400 billion tons of suspended carbon, land biomass has 2,000-3,000 billion tons and the atmosphere contains 720 billion tons of CO2. The latter alone is more than 20X current fossil emissions (35 billion tons) shown below.

Of course, the opposite side of the equation is that oceans, land and atmosphere absorb CO2 continuously so the incremental loadings from human sources is very small. That also means that even a small shift in the balance between oceans and air would cause a much more severe rise/fall in CO2 concentrations than anything attributable to human activity.

But since the Climate Howlers falsely imply that the “pre-industrial” level of 290 parts per million was extant since, well, the Big Bang and that the modest rise since 1850 is a one-way ticket to boiling the planet alive, they obsess over the “sources versus sinks” balance in the carbon cycle for no valid reason whatsoever.

 

This post is the second of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the second theme.

Overview

The assembled governments of the world meeting in Glasgow for COP26 are fixing to declare war on the backbone of modern economic life and the abundance and relief from human poverty and suffering with which it has gifted the world. We are referring, of course, to its agenda to essentially drive fossil fuels—which currently make up 80% of BTU consumption—from the global energy supply system over the next several decades.

All of this is being done in the name of preventing global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels.

But when it comes to the crucial matter of exactly which pre-industrial baseline level, you can see the skunk sitting on the woodpile a mile away. That’s because, as we showed in Part 1, global temperatures have been higher than the present—often by upward of 10–15 degrees Celsius—for most of the past 600 million years!

2.  During our Holocene epoch, for the past 11.6 thousand years, earth’s climate has changed often with multiple periods, both warmer and and cooler than the present. The modern warming period since 1850 was preceded by the Medieval, the Roman, and the Minoan warming periods–each was cooler than the previous, and all of them warmer than the present. The last 1.5C of warming has been a boon to human agriculture and civilization, and the next 1.5C is likely to also be beneficial.

Moreover, during the more recent era since the great extinction event 66 million years ago, the decline in temperatures has been almost continuous, touching lower than current levels only during the 100,000-year glaciation cycles of the last 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene ice ages. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, the Climate Howlers have chosen to ignore 599,830,000 of those years in favor of the last 170 years (since 1850) alone.

Still, the juxtaposition of the temperature record of the last 66 million years and the sawed-off charts of the climate alarmists tells you all you need to know: to wit, they have simply banished all the “inconvenient” science from the narrative.

Global Average Temperature Trend, 1850–2018 per the Global Warming Narrative

Needless to say, there is a reason why they start the graphs in 1850, and it is not just because it was the tail-end of the Little Ice Age (LIA), from which low point the temperature trend might well climb upwards for a time as climatic conditions normalized.

Actually, the intellectual deception is far more egregious. To wit, the Climate Howlers want you to believe the absolutely anti-scientific notion that the global climate was in general equipoise until the coal barons and the John D. Rockefeller’s of the mid-19th century set off a dangerous chain of climate dysfunction as they brought the stored solar energy embedded in coal and petroleum to the surface and released its combustion by-products–especially CO2—into the ambient air.

The Risible Myth Of Climate Equipoise

The global warming narrative is the most risible manifestation yet of this leap into self-righteous disregard for evidence, logic, and plausibility. For when you step back from the shrill, sanctimonious narrative that passes for the global warming catechism, the ridiculousness of its central claim that industrial society is destroying the climatic equipoise of the planet is self-evident.

For crying out loud, there has never been equipoise!

What there’s been is 4.5 billion years of wildly oscillating and often violent geologic evolution and climate disequilibrium owing to manifold natural causes, including:

• plate tectonics that has sometimes violently impacted climate systems, especially the assembly and breakup of Pangaea between 335 million and 175 million years ago, and the continuous drift of the present-day continents thereafter;
• asteroid bombardments;
• the 100,000-year cycles of the Earth’s orbital eccentricity (it gets colder when it’s at maximum elongation);
• the 41,000-year cycles of the Earth’s tilt on its axis, which oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and thereby impacts the level of solar intake;
• the wobble or precession of the earth’s rotation which impacts climate over the course of its 26,000 year cycles;
• the recent 150,000 year glaciation and inter-glacial warming cycles;
• the 1500 year sunspot cycles, where earth temperatures fall during solar minimums like the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715 at the extreme of the LIA when sunspot activity virtually ceased.

The natural climate change now underway is, therefore, the product of powerful planetary forces that long predated the industrial age and which massively exceed the impact of industrial era emissions. As we indicated in Part 1, that the present conflation of these forces has resulted in a warming cycle is nothing new—warming has happened repeatedly even in modern times.  Contrary to the false claims of the Climate Howlers,

Current mildly rising temperatures are in keeping with the historical truth that warmer is better for humanity and most other species, too.

Continued planetary equipoise requires no interventions whatsoever by the state to retard the use of prosperity-fostering fossil fuels or to subsidize and accelerate the adoption of high-cost renewable energy.

So the question recurs. What “pre-industrial” temperature baseline can be picked out of all these eras and all these climate change forces that would be anything but an arbitrary political, not science-based, choice?

After all, the science is agnostic. Mother Earth has weathered every kind of climate disequilibrium at both the colder and warmer ends of the spectrum and, crucially, experienced the eventual release of countervailing forces that took both temperature and CO2 levels back in the other direction.

We think the planet’s climatic resilience is especially evident in the fact that, after five major ice ages, warming forces returned with robust energy until they reversed again, thereby proving there is no doomsday loop that leads in linear fashion to inexorable catastrophe as is embedded in the climate models.

As we noted, during the Holocene Optimum, many of the Earth’s great ancient civilizations began and flourished because conditions were especially hospitable for agriculture and the generation of economic surpluses. The Nile River, for instance, had an estimated three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region. In fact, 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was far more fertile than today and supported large herds of animals, as evidenced by the Tassili N’Ajjer frescoes of Algeria.

That is to say, warmer and wetter was far better for mankind than prior bouts of cold.

Indeed, prior to the post-1850 warming, there had been five distinct warming periods (red areas) since the last glaciers with temperatures above current levels. Never, of course, does this chart see the light of day in the mainstream climate change narrative.

Also, during this period, the Vikings established settlements in Iceland and Greenland. Long before the industrial era, Greenland was so warm, wet, and fertile that major colonization occurred after AD 980. At its peak, it included upward of 10,000 settlers, extensive farming, numerous Catholic churches, and a parliament that eventually voted for union with Norway.

Nor was the reversal from the hospitable climate of the Viking era settlements in Greenland merely a regional anomaly has some Climate Howlers have claimed. During the Medieval Warm period, great civilizations flourished in many other areas, which then became uninhabitable.

For instance, a great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299. Grand settlements like those in Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were abandoned. Tree-ring analysis has identified a period of no rain between 1276 and 1299 in these areas.

Needless to say, these extreme weather perturbations were not caused by industrial activity because there was none, and they occurred during a period when it was getting colder, not warmer!

From 1550 to AD 1850, global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago. Hence the designation of this period as the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Self-evidently, when the LIA finally ended around 1850, global temperatures were at a modern nadir (no wonder the Climate Howlers start their charts in the middle of the 19th century).

Mann’s Attempt to Erase Pre-Industrial Warming

But the significance of this fact goes well beyond cropping the temperature charts at 1850. Actually, in order to erase the above-described oscillations of the modern climate, climate change advocates have actually gone so far as to literally attempt to airbrush them out of existence.

We are referring to what we call the climate “Piltdown Mann,” named for one Michael Mann, a newly minted Ph.D. (1998) who became the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lead investigator and advocate for what famously became the “hockey stick” proof of global warming.

The latter, of course, was the blatant fraud embedded in the image that Al Gore made famous in his propagandistic movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. Suffice to say, the purpose of the hockey stick was to wipe out all the evidence summarized above.

That is, in lieu of the planet’s long-term and recent severe climate oscillations, the IPCC posited an entirely opposite thesis. Namely, for the pre-industrial millennium before 1900, global temperatures were nearly as flat as a board.

The only problem is that Mann’s graph was as phony as the Piltdown Man itself—the latter famously being confected in England in 1912 and conveniently “discovered” by an amateur anthropologist who claimed it was the missing link in human evolution. At length, it was shown that the fossil was a forgery; it consisted of a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth.

In the case of the graph, Professor Mann and his accomplices at the IPCC doctored the evidence, used misleading data from southwestern US tree rings in lieu of abundant alternative data showing the contrary, and jiggered their computer models to generate pre-specified results.

That is, the models were produced by goal-seeking on the part of Mann and his associates to prove the man-made warming thesis. In essence, this was accomplished by simply pasting modern temperature records showing steady increases on top of a pre-industrial baseline that never happened.

The phony pre-industrial baseline is depicted by the yellow area in the graph for the period 1400–1900. The hockey stick-like eruption of the yellow space after 1900, of course, allegedly depicts the man-made temperature rise since the onset of the hydrocarbon age.

By contrast, the corrected version is in blue. In this version—which comports with the history of climate oscillations cited above—there is no hockey stick because the shaft never happened; it was invented by computer model manipulations, not extracted from the abundant scientific data on which the Mann study was allegedly based.

So the question is answered. The mid-19th century is exactly the wrong baseline from which to measure global temperature change during modern times.

The blue area of the chart, in fact, is the smoking gun that obliterates the whole predicate on which COP26 is being foisted upon the everyday people of the world.

Background:  See Rise and Fall of the Modern Warming Spike

This post is the first of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the first theme.

Overview

With COP26 now underway, it’s not too soon to start clanging the alarm bells—not about climate catastrophe, of course, but about the stupidest act of the assembled nations since Versailles, when the vindictive WWI victors laid the groundwork for the catastrophes of depression, WWII, the Holocaust, Soviet tyranny, the Cold War and Washington’s destructive global hegemony, all of which followed hard upon the next.

Politicians and their allies in the mainstream media, think tanks, lobbies and Big Business (with its cowardly sleep-walking leaders) are fixing to do nothing less than destroy the prosperity of the world and send global life careening into a modern economic Dark Ages.

And worse still, it’s being done in the service of a bogus climate crisis narrative that is thoroughly anti-science and wholly inconsistent with the actual climate and CO2 history of the planet.

1. During the past 600 million years, the earth has rarely been as cool as at present, and almost never has it had as low CO2 concentrations as the 420 ppm level that today’s climate howlers decry.

In fact, according to the careful reconstructions of actual earth scientists who have studied ocean sediments, ice cores and the like, there have been only two periods encompassing about 75 million years (13% of that immensely long 600 million year stretch of time) where temperatures and CO2 concentrations were as low as it present. These were the Late Carboniferous/Early Permian time from 315 to 270 million years ago and the Quaternary Period, which hosted modern man 2.6 million years ago.  You might say, therefore, that the possibility of a warmer, CO2-richer environment is a case of planetary “been there, done that”.

And it is most certainly not a reason to wantonly dismantle and destroy the intricate, low-cost energy system that is the root source of today’s unprecedented prosperity and human escape from poverty and want.

But that’s hardly the half of it. What actually lies smack in the center of our warmer past is a 220-million-year interval from 250 million years ago through the re-icing of Antarctica about 33 million years ago that was mainly ice-free.

As shown by the blue line in the chart below, during most of that period (highlighted in the brown panels), temperatures were up to 12C higher than at present, and Mother Earth paid no mind to the fact that she lacked polar ice caps or suitable habitats for yet un-evolved polar bears.

Global Temperature And Atmospheric CO2 Over Geologic Time

Moreover, the science behind this isn’t a matter of academic armchair speculation for the simple reason that it has been powerfully validated in the commercial marketplace. That is, trillions of dollars have been deployed in the last century in the search for hydrocarbons, based on immensely complicated petroleum engineering research, theory and geologic models. Oil drillers weren’t throwing darts at a wildcatter’s wall but were coincidentally proving these “facts” of climate history are correct, given that they led to the discovery and extraction of several trillions of BOEs (barrels of oil equivalent).

Consequently, it is solidly estimated by industry experts that today’s petroleum deposits were roughly formed as follows:

• • About 70% during the Mesozoic age (brown panels, 252 to 66 million years ago) which was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the oceans;
  • 20% was formed in the dryer, colder Cenozoic age (last 65 million years);
  • 10% were formed in the earlier warmer Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).

Indeed, at the end of the day, petroleum engineering is rooted in climate science because it was climate itself that produced those economically valuable deposits.

And a pretty awesome science it is. After all, billions of dollars have been pushed down the wellbores in up to two miles of ocean waters and 40,000 feet below the surface in what amounts to an amazingly calibrated and targeted search for oil-bearing needles in a geologic haystack.

Yet during the Cretaceous, CO2 levels actually went down while temperatures were rising sharply. That’s the very opposite of the Climate Alarmists’ core claim that it is rising CO2 concentrations which are currently forcing global temperatures higher.

Moreover, we are not talking about a marginal reduction in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Levels actually dropped sharply from about 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm during that 80 million year stretch. This was all good for hydrocarbon formation and today’s endowment of nature’s stored work, but it was also something more.

To wit, it was yet another proof that planetary climate dynamics are far more complicated and ridden with crosscurrents than the simple-minded doom loops now being used to model future climate states from the current far lower temperature and CO2 levels.

It is surely one of the great ironies of our times that today’s fanatical crusades against fossil fuels are being carried out with not even a nod to the geologic history that contradicts the entire “warming” and CO2 concentration hysteria and made present energy consumption levels and efficiencies possible.

That is to say, the big, warm and wet one (the Mesozoic) got us here.

True global warming is not the current and future folly of mankind; it is the historical enabler of present-day economic blessings. Yet, here we are on the eve of COP26, manically focused on reducing emissions to the levels required to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.

If your brain is not addled by the climate change narrative, the very term rings a resoundingly loud bell. That’s because there have been on the order of 20 distinct “ice ages” and interglacial warming periods during the Pleistocene, the latest of which ended about 18,000 years ago and from which we have been digging out ever since.

In contrast to today’s climate models, Mother Nature clearly did not go off the rails in some kind of linear doomsday loop of ever-increasing temperatures and without any hectoring from Greta, either. Actually, Greenland got all frozen up and thawed several more times thereafter.

Needless to say, the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago is not the “preindustrial” baseline from which the Climate Howlers are pointing their phony hockey sticks. In fact, other studies show that, even in the Arctic, it was no picnic time for the polar bears. Among 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6 °C higher during the optimum than they are today.

Say what? Isn’t that the same +1.6 degrees C above current levels that the COP26 folks are threatening to turn off the lights of prosperity to prevent?

In any event, what did happen was far more beneficent. To wit, the warmer and wetter Holocene Optimum and its aftermath gave rise to the great river civilizations 5,000 years ago, including the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile River civilizations among the most notable.

Stated differently, that +1.6 degrees C was reflective of the climate-based catalyzing forces that actually made today’s world possible. From the abundances of the river civilizations, there followed the long march of agriculture and the economic surpluses and abundance that enabled cities, literacy, trade and specialization, advancement of tools and technology and modern industry—the latter being the ultimate human escape from a life based on the back muscles of man and his domesticated animals alone.

As it happens, when one of the previous “preindustrial” warming eras (the Roman Warming) was coming to an end in the late 4th century AD, St. Jerome admonished the faithful “never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Yet that’s exactly what the assembled nations will be doing at COP26.