One Huge Bucket Of Soot

cross posted at Right Michigan

When the last glacier finally withdrew from northern Michigan some 10,000 years ago, its retreat revealed a signature blanket of dust, pebbles, rocks and boulders in many places piled up hundreds of feet thick. This final vast ice sheet, with a depth of perhaps one mile, like its unyielding predecessors, gouged and clawed its way through the ancient bedrock and soils forever transforming that landscape into the one that is now so familiar to us.

Atop this coating of glacial till where most of us walk every single day, we can easily find the remnants of an even more ancient age, ones that were scooped up by the icy masses from a long dried salty sea and redeposited in our gardens, forests and fields. In fact, Michigan's state stone, the Petoskey Stone, is the fossilized remains of the tropical sea coral, Hexagonaria percarinata, a name I could say ten times really fast if I only cared to.

From the tropics to a land of ice and more ice, from warm salty waters to the sandy soils now surrounded by our cool fresh water lakes, Michigan has already seen its fair share of climate change, every bit of which was achieved without the contemptible usage of dirty carbon emitting lawnmowers and crass barbecue grills.

Much is being made of climate change today, from its potential to melt the ice caps, to its ability to motivate famine, flood, disease and extinction. (I personally would welcome the extinction of the earwig and head lice, so sue me.) This is nothing new. Forty years ago there were very serious concerns about climate change, though those concerns had to do with man-made global cooling. This from Newsweek in 1975:

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.

While many confident scientists, journalists and politicians of the 70s are shyly asking for a do-over on that whole embarrassing global cooling thing, one attitude that has not significantly changed is the desire for governments to do something immediately about the cataclysmic climate disaster that is heading our way. The article concludes:

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Today's alarmists (as well as a few polar bears and caribou) are thrilled that yesterday's alarmists lacked the political clout to act out on their harebrained schemes of blackening Greenland and tearing up pristine Canadian wetlands, though I suspect that somewhere The Joker just kicked a cat.

Today's environmental activists are every bit as bent on immediate action now as what their predecessors were a few decades ago. Armed with evidence of our planet's man-made overheating, (evidence that is, at best, scientifically inconclusive[PDF],) the green army is putting the cross hairs right on Michigan's chest. While yesterday's goof ball reactionaries were crazily scheming to spread soot on the ice caps, today's more rational activists are simply suggesting the destruction of Earth's modern economy while pushing Michigan down the stairs head first. The Joker is now more hopeful.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Gore has become the face behind this movement. From his humble 10,000 square foot hovel near Nashville, Gore has selflessly jetted from location to location around the world to plead with the rest of mankind to stop selfishly jetting from location to location around the world. Mountain to Mohamed and all that.

Michigan is sadly represented in Washington by a number of elected officials that have forsaken Michigan's wellbeing at the behest of Gore's hysterical legions demanding that something be done NOW about global warming.

They have no definitive proof that global warming is the result of human activity. They have no proof that enacting their Michigan economy destroying measures will affect global temperature. They cannot even prove that their measures, if enacted, will not create a worse climate crisis than the one they are trying so earnestly to avoid. The only historical fact that they really do have is that this Earth and this state have been exposed to a dynamic climate since God hung the planets and that huge fiery ball in the sky. This little detail, however, seems to be of no special importance, what is important is that something, anything, be done, and now!

That is why, my friends, they are outside filling up one huge bucket of soot.