At the end of this article is a link to a video in which Bill Nye decided to use the year 1750 as an example of what the world would look like without man-made climate change. I want to spend a moment making sure that everyone knows that this choice makes Bill Nye a liar, and while this lie might not sound like that big of a deal, it is a great example of a larger lie, making it instructive.
Bill Nye could have picked the year 1940, as the rapid expansion of CO2 occurred only after the end of WWII.
Bill Nye could have picked 1900, which was before cars and things kicked the Industrial Revolution into high gear.
Bill Nye could have picked 1850, when the Industrial Revolution was just starting.
But had Bill Nye picked one of those time periods, people might ask a very obvious question – is the climate really different today than it was in those earlier periods? That’s actually a very good question, so I’ll answer it.
If you are standing in a parking lot in the sun, it certainly is different. Parking lots absorb heat from the sun, and it is often a little warmer when standing in something that radiates heat than when standing where there is no radiating heat.
If you are standing in a city, the climate has changed, as cities have grown, and cities are full of things like parking lots, that absorb and then radiate heat. It is often a little warmer in a city than in the country.
But how different is the climate, outside of these very localized changes?
When I was a child, the Detroit River and Lake Erie were all so polluted that fires would spontaneously erupt on the surface of the water. Today, I eat walleye from the Detroit River and Lake Erie.
When I was a child, particulate matter in the air was a real problem in most urban areas, and many large cities were covered in smog. Today, no such smog exists.
Our air, water, and soil are radically cleaner than they were just thirty or forty years ago, so our climate, in that sense, is very different in a positive way. In other parts of the world, such as China, that is not the case. Breathing the air in Beijing is worse for you than is smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. China has not yet become wealthy enough that the people demand a cleaner environment – the people in China are still more concerned with getting things like food, than with how clean the air is.
Is the temperature different than it was when I was a child? Yes. The Earth’s temperature dropped a little from the 1940s into the 1970s, and it was notably colder when I was a child as a result. We also got more snow (and I was shorter, so less snow looked like more). Scientists, in the 1970s, were suggesting that we fight the impending ice age by, for example, spending trillions of dollars dropping soot on the polar ice caps, in the hope that covering the ice with something black would cause the ice caps to absorb heat, and help prevent global cooling.
Imagine where we would be today had we spent our economic capital blanketing the polar ice caps with soot, rather than using that wealth to better our lives. We would be more poor, and the polar ice caps would be polluted with who even knows how many metric tons of soot!
We know now that the Earth has a natural warming and cooling cycle in which is warms for about thirty years, and then cools for thirty years. This sixty year cycle of warming and cooling has been going on since at least the end of the last ice age, and is continuing to this day. It is, in fact, starting to get colder again, and will continue to do so for the next 25 or so odd years. We did not know about this cycle in the 1970s, just as we do not have any idea how to build an accurate climate model today.
The most accurate climate model, today, is the Russian model. The Russian model is also the one that does not predict anything we would in any way want to be alarmed about.
The Earth has warmed since I was a child by about the same amount it previously dropped, and today looks, temperature wise, much more like 1940 than 1970.
Bill Nye did not pick 1940 for that reason.
When Bill Nye says that the Earth would look like it did in 1750, he is picking the middle of the little ice age, when the Earth was so much colder than normal that the trees they make violins out of were hyper-condensed (with little annual growth causing very tight rings), allowing Stradivari to make the best violins in human history – violins that even with all of our modern technology, we can not replicate. The Thames River was icing over to the point that you could walk across it every year, in that time period. Bill Nye is literally blaming humans for ending the little ice age.
Do you know what else the little ice age had? It was a period of great famine, the plague known as ‘The Black Death,’ and witch hunts. I wonder if Bill Nye wants to see a return to the these events, that were caused by such cooling?
Before the little ice age, it was warmer than it is today, so Bill Nye does not want to go back before the little ice age. He picked his time period very carefully.
Bill Nye is a liar. The little ice age ended more than 100 years before mankind began emitting large amounts of c02, making the notion that the world would in any way look like 1750, were it not for mankind, absurd.
Nor would we WANT to go back to the temperatures from 1750. Mankind has always done better on a warmer planet than on a cooler one.
Anyway… Here is the link to the video where Bill Nye exposes himself as a liar.
This lie is instructive, because it is a part of a larger lie, which is the notion that ‘97% of scientists agree’ with Bill Nye. The vast majority of scientists agree with the statement “The climate has changed, and mankind has had some impact on the climate.” I mentioned a number of ways mankind has impacted the climate in this article, none of which have anything to do with c02 emissions.
Once you move beyond the statement, “The climate has changed, and mankind has had some impact on the climate,” the consensus does not just drop; it ends. Here is an article on the actual science of climate change. As you will see, the majority of climate scientists do not believe that mankind’s impact is in any way significant, and of the minority who do see our impact as significant, most of them think our impact is positive, as mankind generally does better on a warmer planet than on a colder one.
As always, leftist attempts at alarmism are not about the environment, but are really about control.
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