I question the timing!

Of what?

Of Global Warming, for starters. The main reason I'm a skeptic is because I was in college at UC Berkeley in 1972 -- back when they still had global cooling. Professor Clemens of the UC Berkeley Department of Paleontology had it all laid out in graphs and charts, and he maintained that not only were we still in the Ice Age (which consisted of lots of up and down periods of glaciation), but that we were headed into another cooling blip -- meaning the glaciers would return. Back in those days, only geologists and paleontologists really cared, because it wouldn't have occurred to anyone that we humans had control over the climate.

Average temperatures go up and they go down, like stock prices. Periods of glaciation -- traditionally referred to by the European names of Gunz, Mindel, Riss, Wurm -- came and went along with the sheets of glacial ice they brought.

Anyone can draw a graph of what has gone on during any period of time, but over what period? Do we chart the Dow average for an hour, a day, a week, a year, or over the life of the stock market? Is it going up, or is it going down?

And the stock market is easy -- because we know exactly when it started, and there are detailed records. Climate has existed on this planet for billions of years, so to declare that the planet is "warming" is misleading without some reference point.

What I want to know is, Global Warming in relation to what? The reference point seems to be the beginning of the "Industrial Era" -- a period I tend to associate with Charles Dickens and Victorian soot. Considering geologic time, what makes that tiny little blip in human history so damned special? Man has been around for thousands of years before Dickens, and hundreds of thousands of years before that in uncivilized form, and so what? Man is so insignificant in terms of geologic time as to be of no consequence at all. Global Warming is based on an unproven assumption that recent human measurements which mean nothing in the context of geologic time are meaningful when seen in the context of couple of centuries. The only reason centuries seem important is because of the human lifespan. We live less than a century, so the century is seen as a measuring stick. If we lived for 500 years, I suspect a fifty year trend wouldn't be seen the same way.

Equally unproven is the assumption that humans are responsible for a geologically infinitesimal trend. I think that picking the Industrial Era is a classic case of post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, and I have long suspected that carbon dioxide was selected as the cause with the specific goal in mind of asserting an anthropogenic cause. Because there's no quantitative proof of precisely how much CO2 it would take to actually warm the planet by increasing the Greenhouse effect, the proof takes the form of simply coupling higher C02 levels with a slight rise in temperature, and asserting that because man caused the former, he therefore caused the latter.

The chart I'd really like to see is the development of Global Warming hysteria in relation to the development of anti-Bush hysteria. I suspect there's a direct relationship.

I'm not alone in questioning the timing. Via Pajamas Media, Pieter Dorsman wonders "how global warming made it to the center of the political agenda and why it has become such an incredible success story, despite the real questions being raised about the science underpinning it all." And like me, he suspects that climate hysteria may be linked more to politics -- in particular the 2000 election results -- than to climate.

And while many on the right still rejoice over Al Gore's defeat in 2000, one has to wonder where climate change would be on the agenda today had the former veep captured the White House that year.

At the risk of sounding like a hopless relativist, I have to wonder why relativism has all of a sudden become such a profound evil.

I can remember when lots of things were relative, and relativism was a useful tool in science. We're all familiar with absolutism (normally associated with politics or religious fundamentalism), but I can't remember ever seeing as much absolutist thinking in science as I am now seeing in the case of global warming and greenhouse gases.

Or has scientific relativism become relative to the absolutism of the day?

I propose we call the past seven years the Bush Warming Period.

UPDATE (02/13/07): Tim Blair has documented a new scientific truth -- to wit, "the terrible connection between Al Gore and global coldening"

Days after Al Gore went to New York City last month to deliver a speech blasting the Bush administration's environmental policy and touting the dangers of global warming, the National Weather Service reported record low temperatures across the region.

As a matter of fact, it's snowing in Philadelphia right now.

Coincidence?