Fact or Fiction is a useful term commonly applied to books or other writings.
Some writings may be wholly fact, such as tourist brochures and travel books whilst others, like science fiction novels, may be entirely fiction.
I like to read detective novels and these books may be a blend of fact and fiction. The characters are always fictional by name but the author may base them on known personalities.
The plot is usually fictional but may be based on something that really happened. The locality (Yorkshire, Mallorca, Australia etc.) is often factual, more or less, as far is geography is concerned.
So for any entity, nothing is truly black and white. Fact and fiction can be blended in a bewildering array. So too when the term is applied to global warming.
The most amazing factual thing about global warming is the conveniently forgotten rapid major climate change from the past ice age to the present warm interglacial period.
This rapid global warming can only be considered as beneficial to mankind. It was the cause of the rapid development of the human race and the eventual distribution of humans to all corners of the earth, due to retreat of the ice.
Americans should be thankful for this short period of global warming because at the height of the last Ice Age, a mere 50,000 years ago, the localities of Chicago and New York were buried under a kilometer thickness of ice. Now it is gone, all melted, thank goodness. This is a fact.
So much water was tied up in ice sheets globally that that the sea level was about 130 meters lower than today. The continental shelf of the land was exposed to the elements of erosion, by the rivers and the atmosphere. Human beings at this time were very primitive and few in number. Their origin is thought to be in East Africa, from whence they migrated north to Europe and east to Asia. In Australia we know that with the indigenous Aborigines their arrival dates back to at least 40,000 years ago. At this time it was possible to traverse on land what is now the Bering Strait and so the Asian human beings populated North America (ca 20,000 years ago) and eventually South America, as far south as Tierra del Fuego. What a long walk!
Global warming has been a good thing! We should not be frightened of it!
The rapid warming period from about 17,000 to 10,000 years ago amounted to a global rise in temperature of about 7 degrees C, or an average temperature of 15 up to 22 degrees C, or thereabouts. All the excess ice melted and sea levels rose by 130 meters to cover the continental shelf again and so stabilize at the present level.
We have become very accustomed to the present climate, but geologically our climatic situation is only of an ephemeral existence. We are exposed to the whims of Nature. The Aztecs of old knew that we live at the mercy of the Gods!
It is a fact that here we have a wonderful example of global warming.
It is a fact that this global warming was not caused by man burning fossil fuels and so liberating CO2 into the atmosphere. This did not happen.
It is Nature that controls our climate! The puny activities of man can be ignored!
Continually we are bombarded by the media and Green Movement and their backers that we must change our life style and stop burning fossil fuels that supposedly pollute the atmosphere with "greenhouse gases" or CO2 in particular, which they say causes dangerous global warming. Are the Greens any different from the Aztecs by promoting fear amongst the populace and using bizarre remedies to break prolonged droughts, and so "solve climate change"?
Today there is a deliberate demonization of CO2 gas and the element carbon, which is a nonsense. CO2 is the life blood of the biosphere and there should be more, not less, of it in the atmosphere. Carbon is an essential element of all life forms.
Yet, the EPA (US) has now declared CO2 a dangerous atmospheric gas which must be monitored and its emissions controlled and taxed!. Is the EPA mad! Why are they doing this? What is going on?
Don't let true science and the facts get in the way of making money. If you can make money out of promoting bunkum then why not do so? Is this a standard human activity? May be so on a modest national scale. When the idea comes to grief, like with the recent US and EU investment and promotion of "sub-prime mortgages", which produced the devastating global financial crisis, then we must sit up and take notice. What other dodgy schemes are being promoted that potentially have the means of devastating the World economy?
The people promoting the global warming bandwagon will be meeting in December at the UN's Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. This is their last ditch attempt at renewing the Kyoto Protocol to enforce a worldwide policy of reduction of so-called dangerous "greenhouse gases". A favored secret agenda of having a world socialist Government controlled by the United Nations and financed by a global carbon tax, is hovering in the background.
The proposed Government policies in the US and Australia involving "Cap and Trade", or "Carbon Taxes", and the Australian Labor Government's "Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme" all fall short of having a genuine factual scientific backing. The politicians are promoting a spurious remedy for a non-existent problem!
Fortunately we already know the undesirable economic effects of trying to move to a low carbon usage Green Utopian world. The European Union is in turmoil from having experimented with "Cap and Trade" carbon reduction schemes for several years. The UK in particular, is in irreversible economic decline. Do we want to impose the same chaos on the USA and Australia?
Don't take my word for it. This last month has seen a welcome splurge of books exposing the inner workings of the global warming bandwagon and how the Greens and their backers are threatening your life style and associated freedoms.
I can recommend "Air Con" written by New Zealand investigative journalist and publisher, Ian Wishart, who has in 285 pages exposed the true nature of the Green Movement and all the machinations of the US Green lobby groups. Big business has much to benefit from supporting the global warming bandwagon, at the considerable expense of the man in the street.
April 2009 has seen the launch of the best seller "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - The Missing Science" by Ian Plimer. This book exposes all the fallacies of the global warming belief system. Plimer is Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, South Australia.
Happy reading!
References:
(1) "Air Con ... The Seriously Inconvenient Truth about Global Warming" by Ian Wishart
Howling at the Moon Publishing Ltd (2009); www.ianwishart.com
(2) "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - The Missing Science", by Ian Plimer.
published 2009 by Connor Court (Australia) and Quartet Books (UK), www connorcourt.com