The Ice Man Cometh

I take the position most of the Al Gore brand of AGW is merely a fraud, a way of scraping off a few billion more from the people who generate wealth by actually working. Yes, the climate is changing, but we are headed for an Ice Age. So it behooves us to think along those lines.

This would be easier to explain if I could put on a visual demonstration, but sunspots are critical to our winters. That is, if they are missing, then the energy which tends to warm the world does not moderate the build-up of the polar heat sinks. When vast cubic miles of air cool off over either pole during winter because of tipping away from the sun, that air spills down the sides, giving us the Polar Express cold fronts. It tends to fall over continental land masses, because oceans have much more stable temperatures, and tend to be warmer longer than land. Cold air is dense, and when it expands so far, it warms up. Bumping up against the warmer equatorial air will speed things up a bit. So it eventually weakens. In places like Siberia, the more land extends farther north and farther south, and a massive mountain range tends to block the equatorial warmth, so it stays colder longer. The missing sunspots allow the temperatures to drop farther on average, so the permafrost spreads southward.

As the normal rains turn into snow, and cooler summers melt less of it, the ice fields we see in Greenland or Antarctica spread toward the Equator. Northern cities near the center of any continental land mass will tend to disappear soonest under the ice, but eventually the northern oceans will ice over permanently and give the ice fields a solid footing everywhere. Records indicate it comes rather quickly, requiring only a decade or two to chase human occupation south.

I’ve over simplified, of course, to offer a bigger picture.

An interesting rabbit we can chase here is the conflict between the Young Earth Creationists and everyone else. Overlaying our current best dating of biblical events with apparent scientific understanding, we see the last Ice Age ended about the time when the Bible says Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden. The conflict is more conceptual than anything else. There are two items we need to consider.

One — We cannot pretend our Western rational cultural heritage prepares us well to read the most ancient Hebrew texts of Scripture. Much of what we believe the Bible says is actually a matter of us reading our biases back into the text. The language of the early chapters in Genesis is parabolic, and someone from an ancient Hebrew culture would be exasperated at how Creationists read things. It’s not all that hard to find out at least some of what Ancient Near Eastern epistemology was like, but no one wants to try too seriously among the Creationists.

Two — Why does everyone assume God had to create the world all fresh and new? Do we suppose He lacks the wisdom and imagination necessary to create it in a mature condition? Why is it necessary for He who created matter itself to wait a billion years or so to make use of the Universe? In other words, Western bias is also a sin of the anti-Creationist crowd. If God wanted to create an already ancient world, it would be no more difficult than creating anything else. You may say that sounds like God deceiving all the scientists, but I don’t recall too many of them giving a rat’s patootie what He thinks in the first place. They didn’t ask Him, didn’t seek His revelation to understand what is going on, so they can’t assume to know, and surely can’t assume to question God.