As the world warms from its geologically recent experience in the LIA freezer both receding glaciers and melting permafrost uncover relics that prove the world was warmer in the past than it is at present.
As they retreat up valleys and mountains melting glaciers expose trees that once lived at higher elevations. The significance of this for climate change worries must be pointed out to the public. If trees grew at higher elevations in the past the world must have been warmer then than it is now.
Similar discoveries are being made as permafrost melts. Frozen mummies are now being exposed to our warming planet but this immediately raises the question of how and when did the mummies get buried in the permafrost. The obvious conclusion is that the world was even warmer in the past than it is now in order for them to be buried in that ground in the first place.
This tells us that without the aid of human emissions of CO2 the world attained a warmer state that we experience today and there was no tipping point, no runaway global warming. The world can warm without the assistance of CO2 in a flux of natural variability. We must account for this in our attempts to assign blame to CO2, the current star of our climate drama.
If CO2 is not necessary to climate variability then how do we know that our modern warming is not due only to the natural factors that created a warmer world in the past. Without the metrics to explain that warming we have NO BASIS to indict CO2 for our current warming.
In fact, CO2 may be contributing nothing at all to our current warming. How would we know if we can’t assign metrics to previous planet warmings? Were past warmings due to solar variability, differences in cloudiness, volcanic activity, ocean currents, etc. If we don’t know how to assign metrics to these and other factors that can alter the climate then how can we know whether or not they are active and to what extent today?
The uncovering of artifacts of past natural warmings tells us that our current warming is NOT unequivocal or unprecedented. Our modern instrumentation - satellites - corroborated by radiosonde balloons tells us that our modern warming is NOT accelerating.
The story of the melting mummies in the NYT exonerates our CO2 emissions as the perp of modern warming. NYT, we are forever grateful.
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