Climate Change and Civilization

I know that a couple of ships stuck in the ice doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but I still think it's funny. Like a few years ago when they had a big international conference about global warming in Denmark, right in the middle of the coldest winter that country had in 20 years. Last year Russia and China had record breaking cold winters, and now it's apparently our turn. Next year might be the opposite extreme, but it still wouldn't prove anything. If you want to prove anything about global warming you have to use statistics, and the people who are conversant with statistics can make those numbers say anything they want to, especially now that they have computers. Long before the advent of computers, Mark Twain said it best: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."

Seriously, though, I read in National Geographic that, while the Arctic ice pack has been shrinking for some time, Antarctica has been losing ice on one side and gaining it on the other, with a slight total increase of ice for Antarctica as a whole. If present trends continue, the Arctic Ocean will be ice free at some point, and several national governments are already making plans to lay claim to it. Meanwhile, the tree huggers are worried about what's going to happen to the polar bears when all the Arctic ice melts away. Why not round some of them up right now and send them to Antarctica, just to see how they like it down there? If it works they could evacuate all the polar bears from the Arctic to the Antarctic when the Arctic ice melts away. Who's going to pay for it, you ask? Why the U.S. taxpayer, the same people who are paying for all that Martian foolishness. We're already paying for everything else, so why not?

 While it's true that Africa and the Mid East have been worn out from over use, it is also believed that climate change had something to do with it. Africa used to be heavily forested like a million years ago, which was convenient for our distant ancestors who liked to climb around in the trees. Then, the climate got drier and much of Africa turned into desert and prairie, forcing them to learn to walk on two legs and obtain their food by chucking spears at large animals. This required cooperation and team work, so they had to learn how to talk to each other and evolve bigger brains so they could remember all those words.

There have also been a couple of climatic shifts in the Mid East, which influenced how civilization developed there over time. Ancient Egypt was not always a square country like it is today, it used to be long and skinny, hugging the banks of the Nile. During long dry spells, nomadic herdsmen would come in out of the desert and hang around Egypt making a nuisance of themselves, so the Egyptians would put them to work building pyramids just to keep them out of trouble.

Mesopotamia was built between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and, even today, there are some marshy wet regions in Iraq. There is a whole culture living there called the "Marsh Arabs". When Saddam was in charge, they pissed him off and he had a big project going to drain the marshes and leave those guys high and dry. Before he could finish it, though, he was overthrown, and the Marsh Arabs have been working to restore the wetlands ever since. In ancient times, the land between the city states wasn't as deserty as it is today, but it was pretty poor pasture, and the people who lived on it had to keep moving around to keep their flocks fed. Every once in a while, some of these nomads would get their act together and conquer one or more of the city states, like the Hebrews did in Canaan. Of course the city states were always fighting with each other too, which caused its share of wear and tear on the land as well.

While most of the big climate changes happened before humans were living on the Earth, there have also been a few significant ones in recorded history, and there must have been some back in the days when people were wearing bare skins and chucking spears at each other. Like it says in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing new under the Sun. Of what can it be said: 'See, this is new?' It has all happened before, in the ages lost to memory."