Global Warming Moonbats Say St. Andrews Is Threatened

Ignoring the fact that, according to the US National Climate Data Center, temperatures have shown a cooling trend since 1998, a St. Andrews University professor is predicting that the Old Course will have completely eroded by 2050. She of course blames it on human activity and is encouraging countries to meet emissions targets.

In the first place, I’m willing to lay money that St. Andrews won’t disappear. At the very least, they’ll build a sea wall.

But that aside, even assuming that there’s global warming, emissions likely have nothing to do with it. There have been long term warming and cooling trends for as long as anyone has been keeping track. There was, for example, a warming period from 200 – 600 AD. That was followed by a long cooling trend that likely had much to do with the fall of Rome and the collapse of European civilization. Following the cooling phase in the Dark Ages, there was a strong warming period from 950 – 1300 AD. That’s when the planet was warm enough for the Vikings to colonize Greenland. It also coincides with a rise in population and increasing urbanization. Then the Little Ice Age of 1300 – 1850 struck. That’s when the Greenland colony failed, Jamestown and Plymouth colonies nearly failed for lack of food, Washington suffered two horrible winters, a food crisis led to the French Revolution, it snowed in July in New England, Napoleon lost an army in Russia, and so on.

Temperatures have been rising since 1850 because the relatively cooler ice age is over. It’s been proven through the study of tree rings that it was warmer in the year 1000 than it is today. I daresay that the links land St. Andrews sits on was solidly above water in those days also.

Here’s an interesting thought. What if the effect of pollution is not to to make things warmer, but to shorten the length of the natural warming-cooling cycle? That would explain the overall cooling trend of the last ten years. After all, in the 1970s (for those of us old enough to remember), the big fear was a return of an Ice Age. Scientists told us that emissions were going to cloud out the sun’s rays and cool us down. Here’s the text of a 1975 article on global cooling from Newsweek. I also remember a Popular Science issue with a cover painting of a glacier engulfing New York City.

I’m also old enough to remember being told in school that overpopulation would cause a worldwide food crisis in the 1990s. Anyone remember the Harry Harrison book, “Make Room, Make Room”, which became the movie “Soylent Green”? I still have the stop overpopulation button our science teacher gave us. It was festooned with skulls.

We’ve also managed to survive a large number of other certain disasters. We didn’t get nuked by the Russians or the Chinese. The 1970s turned out not to be a depression (although today’s financial “crisis” looks like a cakewalk compared to those years). We didn’t all die of the “swine flu” or “legionnaires’ disease” or AIDS. Comet Kohutek didn’t collide with the Earth and cause species extinction. Our nuclear plants didn’t melt down and radiate us all. Mt. St. Helens was not the start of a series of geothermal disasters. The S&L crisis didn’t bankrupt the nation. Y2k didn’t end civilization as we know it. (Does anyone besides me remember the media frenzy over each of these?)

And the Old Course is not going to fall into the sea.