Climate change fever, then and now

Funny, the things you find in old boxes of paper in the attic. I've been going through them, little by little, getting rid of things that have been squirreled away for many years — old editorials, old columns, old poems, old plays started but never finished.

Something I've decided to keep is a 1974 special report written by Charles A. Fuller, Jr., a staff reporter for the old Journal of Commerce. I kept it as something I might want to re-read and refer to at some future time. Some future time as now.

The report Fuller wrote is titled 'Gold, World's Most Controversial Metal — Its Past, Present and Future.' Fascinating stuff. Did you know that gold is so malleable it can be cold hammered to a thinness of five millionths of an inch? That a single ounce can be drawn into a wire 50 miles in length?

We read and hear a lot about gold now, of course. TV shills urge those who worry about the dollar's soundness in the Age of Obama to buy it as a hedge against financial ruin.

They may well be on to something. But if gold is the answer, why do they try so hard to sell it? Is there a philosopher's stone out there, a secret plan to convert base metal into gold? But I diverge.

Buried in Fuller's excellent report, which is not so much about metallurgy as it is about the perils of over-reliance on fiat (paper) money, is something that has nothing to do with either. It's climate change. With Washington digging out of record snowfall, with 49 of the 50 states having measurable snow on the ground and, as I write, with Charleston itself covered in white stuff for the first time in a decade, let's have a look at the Alice in Wonderland world of Al Gore and how it differs from the world of days gone by.

'The full impact of a current global change in climate has not yet sunk into public consciousness,' Fuller wrote in 1974. 'Reid Bryson, director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, predicts that a cooling of the Arctic may have such an adverse impact on agriculture that 1 billion persons (one third of the world's population) may starve in the coming years.

'Since 1945, temperatures in the Arctic have dropped 2.7 degrees, enough to shift the polar vortex of winds southward and block monsoons from parts of Africa, Central America, India and China. Mr. Bryson's belief that the earth has entered a long-term cooling period is supported by other scientists, and a recent report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on ‘the new ice age' concludes that substantial areas of the earth's surface may become permanently uninhabitable within 20 years because of drought in large parts of Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Southern India and Central America.

'Mr. Bryson sees no evidence that the cooling trend will be reversed, a dilemma which he believes stems from air pollution both man-made and natural in the upper layers of the atmosphere.'

How could these climatologists of yesteryear be so wrong, and the ones of today so right? Could it be that climatology is no more a science than, say, alchemy is?

If you take into account damning disclosures of politically influenced research by dedicated global warmers, and their clumsy efforts to silence those who doubt Al Gore's 'inconvenient truth,' you are well advised to check your premises before climbing aboard anybody's bandwagon. If you don't like the weather, well, wait a minute — in geological time, of course.

The truth is that planet earth always has experienced periods of alternate warming and cooling.

This does not mean that we should discount out of hand environmental concerns in the climate change debate. Do we all want cleaner air?

Of course we do, and in fairness, enormous strides have been taken in the developed world to achieve this. Those who lobbied hard to get lead out of automotive fuels and power plants and factories to install smokestack scrubbers deserve undying gratitude for their efforts.

Do we want an America no longer dangerously dependent on foreign imports of energy? Certainly. Our long-term survival as a great nation demands it. But making energy more expensive, as advocates of the cap and trade bill insist on doing, is not, even in the best of times, a desirable solution. In the worst of times, the times we are in today, it is sheer madness.

We need to exploit fully our own substantial domestic reserves of oil and natural gas. We must hasten the next generation of nuclear power plants. In both endeavors the environmental movement in this country must be a partner, not an obstacle. The good of the country demands it.

Thirty-five years ago, climatologists might not have been surprised if by now we here in Charleston were grown accustomed to seeing polar bears sunning themselves on High Battery. Climatologists today, some of them, predict that in a far shorter period of time melting polar caps and rising sea levels will have us all under water. They were wrong then, and no one should be surprised if they are wrong now.

The Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways.

R.L. Schreadley is a former Post and Courier executive editor.