Thursday, August 28, 2008

news blurb...uniformitarianism no more

Blurbat: Freeman Dyson recently wrote that in order to understand global warming it must be understood as religion. More evidence for this comes from a recent article from BBC news.

Many artifacts have been found recently in the Swiss Alps which indicate that these high mountain regions were readily accessible to humans. And interestingly, the dating of these artifacts corresponds to times when the Earth was calculated to be going through an especially warm period (around 3000 B.C.).

Dr. Holdren of Harvard University in a recent pro-alarmist polemic states that the major reason for global warming alarmism is that the Earth is in an unprecedented phase of global warming. Well if our ancestors were encamped at the top of the alps a mere 5,000 years ago, then our current warming is not unprecedented...never mind the controversy about the medieval warm period.

An objective observer might say that things are more complicated than how the alarmists see them. The BBC article goes on to state that the warming that allowed habitation of the alps was caused by fluctuations in the orbital pattern of the Earth in relation to the Sun.

My science classes taught the principle of uniformitarianism. This principle holds that the natural processes operating in the past are the same as those that can be observed operating today. But now we hear from Martin Grosjean, the climatologist studying the Alpine paleoclimate, that in the past the driving force for climate change was the Earth's orbital pattern; now it's greenhouse gasses.

This should be a story of major significance. The principle of uniformitarianism we were all taught in high school and college science class is dead.