Climate Change

I've often heard jokes about elderly people making statements about "these kids today".  Jokes about how they all echo comments such as: "I had to walk 25 miles to get to the school house barefoot, in 2 feet of snow, with the wind blowing in my face so cold that ice would freeze when tears would form".   I am no meteorologist.  Furthermore, I possess no crystal ball.  I have no idea of what the future may bring to this planet, or bring to anyone who walks upon it.  I do have a very well formed, if not well informed, opinion on the topic of climate change.  That is to say, I have no doubt that global warming is real, but I have serious doubts about its suggested cause.

History has a tendency to repeat itself.  You can see it on the micro-temporal level, we have pop culture trends for example.  Slicing up a good pair of jeans to make them look worn, colorful hair courtesy of temporary dyes, and the band One Direction are all popular among their respective cultures in youth.   When I was a teenager about twenty years ago, you could replace One Direction with New Kids on the Block and make the exact same statement.

Growing the scope now to a more macro-temporal level, you can see the fall of various dynasties, and empires - the Egyptians, the Romans, the Mayans, etc.  Battles over land, battles over religion, battles over trade, but always battles.

Medieval Ice Skating by Esaias van de Velde

If you back the scope up even further still, we reach my point.   The ice age was an event that most elementary school kids have heard about. However, it's often taught as if it were a single event.  I will spare this post my ranting about the failure of the American school system, but suffice it to say, it was multiple events.  There were at least five major glacial ages.  Also, there are known events - or at least a known event - called the Little Ice Age.   While not a true ice age, this was a period where the climate changed, and was considerably colder than what was considered normal for the time period and it happened in medieval times, and was thought to last about 500 years. There are a few theories behind it, but I am fond of one known as solar variation.

So now we come back to the here and now and global warming - climate change as it's often cited in reference to the present day.   There are deniers, and there are enthusiasts, and each side will claim the other is a bunch of nut jobs.  Given enough time, surely one will call the other a Nazi and invoke Godwin's Law (I'm willing to bet in some far corner of the internet - or maybe just on reddit - this has already happened).

However, I propose this thought.  We could be coming out of a little ice age of our own.  Our meteorological advancements have inadvertently pulled the proverbial wool over our eyes.  Meaning that today, we know so much about the weather that we are missing the obvious.  Could we be still emerging from the little ice age that happened during the Tudor reign of the UK?  We have only been recording data for a little over 100 years after all.  Is global warming truly a man-made, chemical induced, phenomenon, or is it simply nature repeating itself - thawing us out, before eventually freezing us back up again?

Maybe if we had a full history we would see a bigger picture that tells us, this is normal.  It would tell us that we are just experiencing the temperature equivalent of a low tide.  In a couple of hundred years it will all cycle around and things will be just as they were when you were a kid.  Only the elder stories then will be about driving to school with no AC when it was 82 degrees outside in November, in Wisconsin.