Is the Earth getting warmer? Yes. Has any of this warming been due to the human variable? No one knows, but there have been many large and small cooling and warming cycles on our planet of the long lasting Ice Age type and smaller events brought on by variable solar activity, volcanoes and other non human factors.
The last Ice Age ended over 10,000 years ago, but no written record of the retreating ice exists. The very first writing of our human history was the story Gilgamesh and about King Uruk, from 2100 BC. In these clay tablets from old Mesopotamia are references to a great flood. It is also mentioned in the bible.
It is most widely thought that as the waters rose in the last days of the Ice Age, a land bridge on the Black Sea broke through and flooded vast stretches of land nearly 7000 years ago.
Robert Ballard, the famed explorer who found the Titanic, has uncovered an ancient shoreline under the Black Sea with artifacts dating back 7000 years. This time would fit into the references of a great flood in several overlapping stories from that time.
The warming has continued to this day. The human variable in our warming cycle was irrelevant then and at best infinitesimal today. The current estimate for man's effect is about .5 degrees Fahrenheit. Even that is suspect due to local urban warming zones around our cities. Other studies show recent past cooling cycles and even a mini ice age at around 1650 where there was a long period of decreased solar activity. Some scientists are predicting another cooling cycle to begin around 2030.
What does all of this have to do with the hysteria around the term Climate Change? While it is true we are pumping hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and pumping enormous amounts of particulate into the air as well, the ultimate effect of this is not known. There may actually be a cancelling effect of the particulate vs. the greenhouse gases.
There are just too many variables to account for in our models, the Earth itself being simply too huge to measure and predict. The Sun's effect on our climate is impossible to measure.
We do need to clean up our act on pollution. That much is certain, but to say that we are headed for a catastrophe is a stretch by anyone. There are as many studies one way as the other and the evidence is contradictory at best and outrageously false at worst. One large volcanic eruption or a violent solar flare could change things either way. Man is on a collision course with nature, but global warming may not be that event.
