Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? Part 2 of 3

“My only quibble: Krakatoa erupted in the 1800’s”
It *also* erupted in 535 in an eruption that was probably larger than the one in the 1800’s.

Procopius, as quoted by Stothers and Rampino[3], says of 536 AD that …
“during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness … and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.”
John Lydus says …
“The sun became dim … for nearly the whole year … so that the fruits were killed at an unseasonable time.”
Michael the Syrian says …
“the sun became dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months. Each day it shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow … the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes.” ( To counter this, sugar of lead was used to sweeten the wine. — Tommy C — )
Rampino[2] et al quotes a report from Cassiodorus stating …
“The sun … seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun’s heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany an eclipse prolonged through almost a whole year. We have had … a summer without heat … the crops have been chilled by north winds … the rain is denied …”
“Now tree-ring data, published by Professor Mike Baillie of Queens University of Belfast, has brought catastrophes almost into modern times. The tree rings show that in the mid 530s — just about the time civilisation on Earth suffered a sharp setback — there was a sudden decline in the rate of tree growth which lasted about 15 years. Clearly, something dramatic had happened.
Catastrophe! Part II (PBS)
NARRATOR
535AD has come and gone- the world has been hit by a catastrophe.
Now comes bizarre weather – the sun is darkened, skies are turbulent, rain is red and snow falls yellow.
There is frost and famine.
Seasons are blurred.
In some places great drought destroys the land. In others floods bring chaos.
The world will never be the same.

and the list goes on

Phillip Stott’s blog: The Clamour of the Times
No Consensus, Much Propaganda
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Entries/2009/4/24_No_Consensus%2C_Much_Propaganda.html
First, here are three quotations taken from a splendid article, ‘Climate change science isn’t settled’, by the brilliant geophysicist, Jan Veizer, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada, who has long researched on the use of chemical and isotopic techniques in determining the climate history of the Earth: MANY people think the science of climate change is settled. It isn’t. And the issue is not whether there has been an overall warming during the past century. There has, although it was not uniform and none was observed during the past decade. The geologic record provides us with abundant evidence for such perpetual natural climate variability, from icecaps reaching almost to the equator to none at all, even at the poles.
The climate debate is, in reality, about a 1.6 watts per square metre or 0.5 per cent discrepancy in the poorly known planetary energy balance.
+Then, secondly, here is a quotation from a most important statement emanating from the Geological Science Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences [the original (.pdf), in Polish, is here]:
“Experiments in natural science show that one-sided observations, those that take no account of the multiplicity of factors determining certain processes in the geo-system, lead to unwarranted simplifications and wrong conclusions when trying to explain natural phenomena. Thus, politicians who rely on incomplete data may take wrong decisions. It makes room for politically correct lobbying, especially on the side of business marketing of exceptionally expensive, so called eco-friendly, energy technologies or those offering CO2 storage (sequestration) in exploited deposits. It has little to do with what is objective in nature. Taking radical and expensive economic measures aiming at implementing the emission only of few greenhouse gases, with no multi-sided research into climate change, may turn out counterproductive.”
+Thirdly, I recommend you read this comment on the nonsense over the current status of Antarctic sea-ice – here is a quotation: “The AGW [anthropogenic global warming] standard for broad acceptance of new theories seems to be ‘not completely implausible – if you avoid actually looking at the body of data or what you might have said last week.’
+Fourthly, exactly as I predicted, Old King Coal is back in the UK, and with a glossy political sheen that it will come with carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) attached. Commentators are rightly sceptical.
+Finally, just in case one is still tempted to believe the nonsense propagated by today’s doomsters and gloomsters, it might be enlightening to review the hilarious set of quotations taken from the great and the good in the 1970s that have been so helpfully gathered together for us by I Hate The Media. Enjoy!

There was an earlier eruption of a different volcano in the area of what is now Naples, Italy known as the Campanian eruption that would have happened at right about the same time that the Neanderthal disappeared and probably delayed/disrupted Homo Sapien migration into Europe. But overall, every major period of feast or famine is climate related and our current system of existence is actually quite fragile and relies on an absolutely huge infrastructure. Human beings are so far removed from things now that it might be impossible to “bootstrap” things back to how they are now if a major global catastrophe were to strike. Who could produce copper wire by hand and then wind a generator to make electricity from a water wheel? Who could even make a hammer from scratch, let alone making bread from wheat grain and clothing from raw cotton. We might very well be right at the zenith of human culture. We are ultimately at the mercy of Mother Nature. She often throws a curve ball to life on this planet and sometimes it’s a “bean ball”. The eruption of 535 set us back for a very long time and the same kind of thing will happen again … repeatedly … in the future.
And storing your own food isn’t going to make any difference because when someone finds out that you are healthy when they are starving, they are probably going to take your food or willing to die trying because they will figure they have nothing to lose and will likely die of starvation if they don’t try. You are going to need to not only have a store of food, but you are going to also need to hide because there are going to be people looking for people like you.

Keith Minto (00:40:07) :
Looking at Table 1. of the methodology it seems that GDP per capita declines with population growth and a cooling scenario.
RESPONSE: Regarding GDP per capita and population growth, as suggested by anna v (04:36:06), cross country analysis shows that, in general, higher GDP per capita is associated with lower total fertility rate (TFR), which is a measure of children per woman of child-bearing age. [Take a look at Section 3 of this paper. ]
With respect to GDP per capita and cooling, I think it’s more accurate to say that GDP (and welfare per capita) is highest for the warmest scenario, but the coolest doesn’t necessarily have the lowest GDP per capita (see the post at WUWT titled Are today’s poorer generations morally obliged …
Tony Rogers (01:04:29) :
In the first chart, isn’t the only difference between the four stacked bars the level of warming? If that’s the case surely all the differences in the bars is down to climate change?
RESPONSE: The different scenarios also differ in their population (although A1FI and B1 have the same populations. The differences between the scenarios are laid out in Table 1 of the paper at: http://goklany.org/library/Goklany%202009%20EE%2020-3_1.pdf
pyromancer76 (07:36:21) : [I have taken the liberty of numbering your comments, for efficiency of response.]
1) … thank you …
RESPONSE: No, thank you!
2) Something rankles, however, and it is the global world view, the envision-for-everyone, analyze-for-everyone, speak-for-everyone perspective that most economists-scientists coming from your background take. One quote: “Specifically, climate change is easily outranked by threats such as hunger, malnutrition and other nutrition-related problems…”
There are so many complexities involved in the issues you are researching and they all begin with the way each society (and their governing elites) organizes its natural resources, education, opportunity for enterprise and inventiveness, rewards for diligent labor, and health practices…
The issues you investigate have been “globalized” and corporations, governmental elites, NGO managers — through the United Nations — are hoping to make their fortunes by “solving them”, aka, eliminating individual societies and individual initiative. Unfortunately, the majority involved in global-speak have authoritarian tendencies, no matter how well intentioned.
RESPONSE: You may recall that what I have done is respond to claims that climate change is the “defining challenge” facing the world, or as others have put, one of the most, if not the most, important environmental problem facing the world today. Because these claims are made with respect to the global scale, my analysis is also at the global scale. If someone had claimed that it was the biggest problem facing the US, then my analysis would have been done for the US (assuming such an analysis was doable).
3) Population is one of the key issues. I respectfully disagree with Robert Bateman (23:01). Everywhere that all citizens — this means including women equally with a recognition of what it takes for families to raise children well — have had access to opportunity for education and economic resources, the birth rate has declined to something like “sustainability”. It is not simply a warm earth and development that have permitted so many billions of us. Authoritarians and patriarchal religions (Catholics, Muslims, etc) are responsible for most of the world’s “overpopulation”.
RESPONSE: Certainly culture and religion are very important factors in determining birth rates and total fertility rates (TFRs). However, some of the historically most Catholic countries (e.g., Italy, Spain) have some of the lowest TFRs in the world. [I talk about this in the last chapter of my book, The Improving State of the World .] I haven’t looked at the TFR data recently, but last I checked it was dropping in Muslim countries as well.
Bill P (11:04:11) :
Mr. Goklany, are you answering questions? …Are you assserting that mankind is better off in a warmer or cooler world?
RESPONSE: What I’m saying in this series of posts is that even if the world warms, other problems will outweigh the problem of climate change through the foreseeable future. In an earlier post at WUWT titled Are today’s poorer generations morally obliged …, I showed that, based on the Stern Review’s analysis, human welfare should be highest under the warmest-but-richest scenario and lower under cooler scenarios.
BTW my html is quite rusty, so pl. forgive any problems in this response on that score.

An interesting reality jumps out when you study Mann’s bristlecone proxy data and the infamous “hockey stick” graphic his process produces. The reality the tree ring data and Mann’s graphic reveal is that nothing has done more to “GREEN” the planet in the past few decades than elevated levels of CO2 in the presence of mild sun-driven warming. That’s the natural science. In the face of huge volumes of data and studies to the contrary, political science has twisted this reality in a truly breath-taking Orwellian manner into 1) warming similar to the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period is bad, 2) warming is caused by an infinitesimal trace gas essential to life supporting photosynthesis, 3) human’s 3% annual contribution to a CO2 starved biosphere is putting the planet at some sort of risk. Just how high would fuel bills have to be elevated by Cap Tax to cut world hydrocarbon output by 1/3, or net 1%? What would such a reduction do to accumulations of CO2? That’s right, it’s quite literally in the noise, if you know anything about control theory. The cost is off the page. Like this recession? Then just wait for Cap&Tax. All of this then begs the question, “If humans can’t reasonably be expected to control the production of CO2, how they can possibly be responsible for the, as yet unproven, horrors of Global Warming?” The answer is, “they cannot and are not responsible.” The true proxy is the political science myth of Global Warming, foisted on a scientifically illiterate public as a distracting red herring to deal with the operational and economic exigencies of permanently declining oil production worldwide without actually revealing or discussing in the open media the most critical national security issue of our time. Doubt this assertion? Then just read all of the IPCC technical reports together with the most recent IEA oil production forecast. Too hard and time consuming? Okay, then just relax and believe the propaganda.

Crosspatch, it is true that initially, when people are fending for themselves, local fights break out. But soon enough, when word spreads of plenty in some distance place, outsiders come looking. That catalyst causes community and cooperation. There is strength in numbers, a concept we humans are genetically configured to figure out.
The second thing that occurs in times of extreme hardship, is that communities separates according to natural land forms and barriers. Marginal growing areas are abandoned and become wilderness once more, separating human groups who must travel through inhospitable territory to arrive in lands of plenty. Few try. Those that make it through either die in a fight, or discover that to live, they have to contribute to the community they initially wanted to steal from.
From these seeds of community, prosperity begins again. Revolution and civil wars (skirmishes at first, major ones later) soon follow when communities become large enough to control other communities. It is a process that best works when self-initiative and individual responsibility is lifted up as the model of expected behavior in the community.