OK, I get out in the woods from time to time.
This summer I visited my oldest friend in Montana. Some muskrat ponds by his place are dry, and this has only happened one other time in the memories of local old timers.
Deer are overrunning my sister's neighborhood. I saw thirty of them heading for the creek, running across people's lawns to get there from a nearby undeveloped hillside. They had a mild winter or two and the coyotes haven't caught up yet.
Is this global warming? I doubt it.
Because:
In another state, Oregon, I spent a lot of time out in the woods during my professional career. I knew where the enclaves of incense cedar and sugar pine were. They were isolated, and so unusual that we had management precautions to make sure our activities didn't impact them. These enclaves were the northernmost occurrence of these species.
I knew where some long-eared bats were hiding out and developed a special plan to make sure a timber sale did not impact their winter quarters. A biologist said this was the northernmost instance of this particular species of bat.
Together, the bats and tree species indicate that the area was once warmer than it is now. Invaders follow changing conditions, not come before them. These enclaves were stressed by changing conditions, dying out, being overrun by more cold tolerant species like Douglas-fir, western hemlock, noble fir, and silver fir, and who knows what species of bat?
In this same area I stood on glacial till plastered on the side of a hill at 4500 feet elevation. This glacial till told me that the entire valley was once filled with ice -- 10,000 or so years ago.
Near McMinnville, Oregon there is a glacial erratic -- a boulder the size of a pickup truck. It's from Montana, and it's been there for 10,000 years. It floated in on a cake of ice during the last ice age.
Is there global warming?
Well, yeah.
Since the little ice age the earth has warmed up enough to allow us to go 35 miles up Glacier Bay in Alaska, when only 200 years ago Captain Cook found ice choking Glacier Bay all the way out to Icy Straits.
Is there global cooling? Maybe, witness the incense cedar and sugar pine being driven out of northern Oregon, into the warmer climates down south.
So?
What about the coal seams I found underneath the indurated volcanic ash in a volcano that was once bigger than Mt. Hood but is now indistinguishable except by expert geologists. It looks like a big canyon to me, but once it was a volcano. The very same volcano that overran trees that were growing on the slopes back then, leaving stump casts on the roof of the bat cave where I found the long eared bats hanging.
Things change.
Al Gore is a stroke junky. He likes the strokes he gets by scaring the hell out of people, and all of the awards that he gets.
Gore has no faith at all in the power of nature to rebound, just like it always has hundreds of times since time began.
Gore has entirely too much faith in the power of man to cause or stop whatever global trend is underway. |
