Global Warming/Climate Change – I believe that I am a reasonably intelligent, articulate, pragmatic, down-to-earth and fair-minded free thinker. I am relatively open-minded and I endeavor to see all sides of an issue before I form my own opinion, hopefully based on something resembling objective truth. I also have an outlook on life that is at least quasi-metaphysical as well as spiritual in nature. That said, I believe that I have a perspective that is unique in many ways.Before I get on to commenting on the alleged “doomsday” scenario, I want to get right out front with my own personal view of how we should take care of our planet: We should remember that we are actually just “guests” here on this planet and should act like it. In Rosicrucian philosophy, no one can actually own anything on this planet; we just have the use of things while we are here. In much the same fashion that most well-mannered people USUALLY act way better when they’re in someone else’s house than when they are at home, so we should strive to live in balance and harmony with Mother Earth, Mother Nature or The Planet, whichever you may prefer to call it. This is the most ethical thing for us to do as well as being the most pro-survival for ourselves. Any platitudes about “saving the planet” are virtually irrelevant as the planet will survive and heal itself over time whatever we deign to throw at it – it is OUR survival that is at risk if we muck things up here.

Metaphysically speaking, there are no mistakes in this universe; there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason although most times it is not readily apparent to us humans what the reason(s) may be. This point could be construed as that it would be virtually impossible for us to screw up anything here – at least not seriously anyway UNLESS it is meant to be that we do cause ourselves to become extinct, in which case, we’ll be gone. I guess the main point that I’m trying to make here is that if we do start to go too far in the wrong direction as a society or as a race, one way or another, it will be corrected. Enough people in the right places will be motivated to act so as to provoke a change. Perhaps 9/11/01 was such an event for the United States, although it would appear from hindsight as if the lesson(s) didn’t take hold for very long with a large percentage of the population. One can only hope that we will not need another such dramatic lesson or worse.

As most of you have probably heard by now, the word has been put out there that we have a looming near-term “planetary emergency” in the works allegedly created by ourselves and that unless we act decisively and quickly, we are DOOMED! I am personally quite unimpressed by the methodology employed by the adherents of this new, almost religion called “Global Warming”; ideas and theories that are advanced as “fact” which in a lot of cases are quite devoid of any actual facts at all and the attempts to censure as well as censor any and all of those who might have the audacity to disagree with them. It is all pretty disgraceful, but certainly it is nothing new – such antics have been going on for literally centuries, nay, millennia. I will attempt to categorize below quite a number of the points that have led to my conclusions:

1. Some of the most eminent scientists and climatologists are intimately involved in many of our daily and/or weekly weather forecasts. Despite a high level of technology, the best multimillion dollar equipment including incredible satellite optics to actually watch storms coming, the best of the best are only accurate some 70% of the time. And we are now led to believe that they have a certainty of events that are still many years away?

2. It has been publicly stated as fact that the top 5 all-time warmest years ever recorded all happened during the 1990s with the hottest of these being 1998. These figures, allegedly acquired from NASA are actually quite false. With a bit of applied research, it can be found that the 5 warmest years occurred during the 1930s instead. These don’t fit the template for today’s theories and were apparently ignored.

3. Within the past couple of years, I believe I heard about the “overwhelming consensus” of scientists and climatologists who agree that global warming is caused by humankind to be of a magnitude of something around 80%. I don’t remember whether this figure was explicitly stated or not, but if not, it was certainly implied. Most recently, I have heard that this figure is down to less than 51%, yet Al Gore, et. al. behave as if it is actually more than 90%.

4. Here’s another research project for you if you dare – go to the “morgue” in any public library or newspaper office and look at newspaper headlines going back say 200 years or so; more if you can find them. In quite a regular, rhythmic fashion, approximately every 25 to 30 years, there will be headlines describing “planetary warming” or alternatively, the next “ice age” is coming, always quoting some scientist, authority or group of scientists and delivered to the public in a manner implying immediate danger. From my own personal knowledge and/or observation, there was an overwhelming consensus in the early 1970s which warned of the “next Ice Age” coming within the span of the next 50 years (roughly the year 2020 to 2025). (As a little kid in the 1950s, I heard the adults talking about the threat of planetary warming that had died out somewhere in the mid-1940s.) One of the scientists involved in that “consensus” of the coming Ice Age, one who is still alive today, has recently publicly stated that it’s (the Ice Age) still coming! His major reasoning? The primary variable involved in temperatures on this planet is the intensity of the solar radiation which reaches our planet and is cyclic in nature – it ebbs and flows. According to him, the intensity of the solar radiation currently is near a peak and will be decreasing soon. Plausible? Perhaps. It actually makes more sense to me than the present theory of CO2 being the culprit.

5. “Thousands of Artic Penguins Missing!” – “Icebergs Melting!” – “Glaciers Disappearing!” Are these examples of current headlines? These were actual headlines from newspapers in 1922!

6. I remember in one of my grammar school grades, a geography teacher talking about Greenland and Iceland and how they were apparently misnamed by explorers who had landed at the wrong time of year (or season) to accurately know the true nature of each place. Since that time, I have learned that Greenland is chronically frozen while Iceland is mostly green and unfrozen, at least in recent times. There are historical references that allude to the time of Eric the Red and the Vikings many centuries ago and their farming of a goodly portion of Greenland – land that today is permafrost despite our recent global warming. Also, unless the Vikings’ maps were totally erroneous, a fair portion of the seas that they sailed back then are waters that are frozen over today.

7. Over the past several decades, scientists and researchers have been all over the Arctic and Antarctic regions. As part of their studies, they have taken numerous “core samples” – core samples which show evidence of numerous thaws and freezes over a span of time going back many millennia. Yet more evidence that climate change has happened repeatedly during much of this planet’s history – it’s about as natural a phenomenon as you can get.

8. Unless a scientist is independently wealthy and can finance his/her own research, the usual manner in which they conduct their research makes them dependent upon grants – sometimes from private sources, sometimes from government sources. Lose their grant money and they are out of business. Without purposely trying to besmirch any scientist’s integrity, the above fact (grants) would seem to give most scientists a great deal of incentive to report only those things that they believe will further their chances of continuing to get grants. Can you just imagine a climatologist investigating possible human causes of climate change filing a report that says “Absolutely NO evidence to suggest that humans cause climate change exists”? How many days do you think would pass before his source of grant money was totally gone? There’s no way that anyone can honestly blame them for that, but that fact alone also takes away any chance he/she might have at objectivity.

9. If you have ever spent any time at all in the vicinity of a lake or some other body of water, you will have seen and probably taken notice of a “high-water mark” along the shoreline sometimes several inches or even feet above the present waterline unless, of course, the waterline is all the way up to the high-water mark and you know what it looks like – it’s characteristics. The same thing occurs with oceans too. The point I am getting to here is that there is evidence that sea levels have changed over vast amounts of time. In particular, from my personal observations of the Pacific Ocean, if you are in a boat at least a half mile or so off the coast of California, there is a hillside between Santa Cruz and Davenport where you can see what are undoubtedly several previous high-water marks on that hillside and a few of them are several hundred feet above the present waterline. This is an indicator of either receding sea levels or the land rising out of the water over time or a combination of the two. I am not an oceanographic (nor geological) expert by any means, but my gut feeling is that the latter is the case, although it would seem as if the land rising out of the water would account for the majority of that distance. The same phenomenon is visible in a few spots off of the Oregon coast and on the other side of the Pacific, just off the coast of Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. I am sure that there are many other examples of this – the ones I have mentioned are just those that I know of personally.

I am sure that I can come up with many more examples to fit this category given a lot more time to check my memory and/or other physical resources in my possession as well as spending time in the library, but I feel that the above should be sufficient for my purposes here. I believe that you just might get the idea, eh?

The bottom line is that over the next several decades regardless of what happens or not, if there are any drastic changes on our planet in terms of climate, sea levels or what have you, humanity will face the same thing that we’ve been facing for literally ages on end – adapt and survive or conversely, refuse to adapt and succumb. It might sound brutal to some, but that’s the reality of living on this planet. If you don’t like that, then leave!

Best Wishes to Everyone Out There for a Joyous Holiday Season! and Happy New Year!