The Conservative Cat

Bruce keeps a Time-Life book in his office called Ice Ages. On page 21 there's a graphic that describes the variations in Earth's climate over the past 4.5 billion years. The past 65 million years form the most recent of seven ice eras, periods during which the world has been cold enough to have at least one polar ice cap. Inside an ice era, there are warm periods separating generally colder ice epochs. It is during these ice epochs that ice ages and interglacials occur. We're currently 10,000 years into an interglacial period. An interglacial generally contains multi-century cycles of warming and cooling. The most recent cool period ended in 1850. Ever since then, we've been experiencing a natural increase in solar output, as evidenced by a melting of the Martian ice caps.

So, perhaps the only rational thing is to prepare for a warmer world that we cannot possibly prevent.

See, what has bothered Bruce ever since he brought home his book on Ice Ages is that 10,000 years is the mean duration of an interglacial, and 65 million years is the mean duration of an ice era. So, if we're a million years out from the end of this ice era, then when the current warming period is over the ice will roll down over Canada and Russia. If we're not, and the current warming period is the Earth's first step on the road to its normal condition, then we're going to lose our ice caps entirely.

Humans want problems to be solved. Liberals in particular want problems to be solved permanently. (This is why environmentalists talk about using renewable energy.) Cutting down our carbon output is something that seems feasible, but preparing for a warmer or colder sun is a whole order of magnitude harder. So, we continue to fiddle while the sun burns, hoping that someone can come up with a technological miracle.

And they are asking for a miracle, folks. The Earth has an oxidizing atmosphere. You can burn carbon to make the greenhouse gas known as carbon dioxide, you can burn hydrogen to make the much more powerful greenhouse gas called water vapor, or you can burn any other flammable thing in the universe to create smog. In fact, the only greenhouse-neutral fuel we've discovered in the entire history of this planet is enriched uranium, and it is U.S. government policy that nuclear fuel should only be used by countries that hate the United States, like Iran, North Korea, and France.

Anyway, the non-nuclear carbon-neutral fuel source we're searching for is only slightly less likely than artificial gravity, so we might as well give up now, and prepare ourselves for a very different Earth from the one that convinced our ancestors it was safe to move out of the caves. It could be that we're going to lose the coastlines completely, or it may be that burning all the oil we can find won't be enough to save us from the ice.

Unlike the current debate over Global Warming, the problem of the next climate cycle will have no happy-time fairy-tale solutions like carbon credits or cap-and-trade. The real world, however, is like that. If we want to live there, we have to be like that, too.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat