The website argues that carbon is essential to life, that higher levels of carbon dioxide lead to environmental recovery rather than degradation, that the amount of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere pales in comparison to levels reached in the distant past, and that the world’s climate has been warming continuously since the “time of the cave man.”

The latter claim is patently absurd: while the world’s climate indeed warmed for several thousand years following the last great Ice Age, the Earth’s climate has fluctuated by at most two degrees Celsius ever since, and then only over the space of a couple decades.

The other claims are neither here nor there. Of course carbon is the building block of life. That does not mean carbon dioxide – not the only greenhouse gas, by the way – is not destructive in high quantities. A look at the atmosphere of Venus will tell you as much.

The other two claims are even weaker. Global warming is potentially catastrophic not because it necessarily threatens life on earth, but rather because it threatens the nature of life on earth, particularly as expressed in our precariously balanced civilizations. Fauna and flora as we know them today will, in many cases, not survive a protracted increase of 2 or more degrees Celsius, particularly if this coincides with the other pressures our societies are exerting on the environment. Our societies are also dependent on the maintenance of a climatic status quo. Increasingly severe storms, desertification, rising sea levels, and changing climatic regimes will in the coming century place tremendous strains on our societies and jeopardize the world’s food supply.

Ultimately there is little sense in entering this “debate.” I simply question the reason – or at least altruistic motivations – of anyone who argues that impact of 7 billion human beings burning countless billions of tons of fossil fuels has a negligible, perhaps even positive effect on the earth’s environment, that truth resides in a tiny minority of specialists funded by energy companies or special interests with libertarian political agendas. I’d love to discover what that malicious consortium of academics pushing the global warming hoax is gaining from their schemes, because it certainly hasn’t reached me yet.

Day One: http://niche-canada.org/node/8621
Day Two: http://niche-canada.org/node/8622

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Historians are reluctant to predict the future, but examination of the past can help our knowledge of the complex relationships between humans and their environments. Humans have always impacted their environment, and the environment has been a strong agent of change throughout the human past. However, the large-scale burning of fossil fuels as part of the greater phenomena of industrialization, which began in the late eighteenth century in Britain and spread across the globe, has impacted the earth’s climate on a scale incomparable throughout human history.