Global Warming – too cold or too hot

We’re surrounded by so much rubbish about what exactly global warming is. You find there are almost as many beliefs about its actual nature as those with strong opinions. For me, I don’t know but it is disturbing. I have no problem in believing, as a lot of the forefront scientists claim, that earth has always undergone unpredictable changes throughout its history and things are no different today. And that while a little vanity may be endearing but to believe that humans are actually responsible for increasing the average temperatures around the world is probably too arrogant without significant supporting facts.

If you scan cyberspace you will find believable arguments for both streams – that it getting hotter and that there is an ice age coming. You will find charts and graphs, molecular analysis of million year old mud that’s been dug up, breakdown of underwater deposits to predict cyclic re-occurrence of climate change and a lot more but what you will not find is any comfort of believability. The confidence we see is just so much bravado or much too forced to be real. Screaming at the top of your lungs is not reinforcing proof.

This year our meteorological department predicted scanty rainfall during monsoon. Everyone was worried. Our economy needs a good rainfall to survive the year ahead. We needn’t have because the top story today is flooding in the north, the likes of which has not been seen for decades. Whole villages are wiped out and many innocent are dead. I can almost hear aftermath yelling starting up about what “we” told you so and how “we” (a different ‘we’) were all warned this was going to happen if ‘we’ didn’t stop playing god with mother nature. There’ll be reports, without any evidence to link what “we” have done to actual flooding and protests marches to let the planet live.

Really! And is this the first time our planet has faced flooding? What about all the earlier flooding, and a lot lot worse, happening before two hundred years (even the worst we-told-you-so-advocates cannot hold mankind responsible for calamities before the nineteenth century – we weren’t technologically ‘advanced’ enough to cause any real damage. Stupid apes cannot cause global warming but stupid apes with a refrigerator do. Its the same pedantic logic (but in reverse) as an amusing bumper sticker – guns don’t kill people, people do. God forbid if guns were removed and people were forced to communicate and resolve their differences.

Floods are common historically and so are ice-ages and green-ages (when increasing CO2 emissions from tectonic shifts and volcanic activities cause global temperatures to rise). Mankind and all our ‘technologies’ are insignificant on a planetary level to cause any such changes by what we do or fail to do. Its absurd. The period we are in right now, also called the interglacial period, is the only time between the two extreme ages that mankind can survive. We would have been extinct had we been born more towards either of the two extremes.

Yes, we are polluting the earth and yes, it is very bad for us and our future generations but let’s stick to calling a spade a spade and not go overboard. We are not responsible for changing the climate of a planet to any degree that would cause significant change by itself. We’re not that grand. The butterfly flapping its wings in Argentina and causing cyclones in China is a theoretical anomaly. We can’t use it explain global warming which is just another phase the earth is going through – because it is its time. And a phase it would be going through even if we were still living in the trees or dragging our women by their hair into a cave.