The Great Depression was created by a series of disastrous public policy responses to an economic downturn.  Our present Government’s reaction to the Housing Crash has been equally inept and risks a similar outcome.  This blog was born from concern that politicians and bureaucrats are extending the unavoidable pain of The Affordable Mortgage Depression.

Economic downturns are routine and expected.  The resulting disruptions are quickly resolved by free markets.  It is only when impediments are constructed to the market clearing mechanisms that economic disruptions become long-lived Depressions.

The Great Depression was born from interventions including Smoot-Hawley (1930), Davis-Bacon (1931), The New Deal (1933), National Housing Act (1934), The Wagner Act (1935), Walsh-Healy (1936) and Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). 

Recent parallels include Stimulus Spending, attempts to Prop Up Housing Prices, Government Bail Outs, Mandated Foreclosure Mitigation Efforts, TARP, Raising the Minimum Wage, Cash for Clunkers and FHA Mortgages.  Looming policy initiatives like Healthcare Reform and Card Check would institutionally restrain economic activity.  Proposed Cap and Trade legislation would cause massive job losses similar to the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. 

Copenhagen U.N. Climate Conference

Given the negative economic impact of proposed Cap and Trade legislation or a Global Carbon Treaty, I hazard a discussion on the subject of Global Warming during the backdrop of the Copenhagen Summit.

The big news out of Copenhagen last week was that this decade is set to be the warmest on record.  According to Vicky Pope, head of the Met Office, “This tells us that global warming is still rising”.  The leading advocates of Global Warming constantly cite observations of rising temperatures as proof of the phenomenon.   

I am no expert on the subject, but isn’t it just common sense that the current decade would be expected to be the warmest on record?  I expect the next decade to be even warmer.  If it is not, it will come as a surprise. 

The observation that temperatures are rising is not proof that man is influencing the global climate, it is only an acknowledgement that temperatures have thankfully been rising on average for the last 18,000, 1,000 and 150 years.

The earth has been getting warmer since the last ice age.  I presume that most Canadians are thrilled by this trend as their country was almost entirely covered by ice until approximately 13,000 years ago.

There have been at least 4 separate cooling events during this broader warming period followed by a resumption of the trend.  They were the Younger Dryas event around 12,000 years ago, the Iron Age neoglaciation 6,000 to 3,000 years ago, the Dark Ages around 1500 to 1000 years ago and the Little Ice Age which concluded around 150 years ago.  I presume that had man become self-aware during one of these periods the conclusion would have been reached that the Earth was cooling.

Recently Global Warming has been rebranded as Climate Change.  I am even more confused by this moniker as the Earth’s climate has been in a constant state of flux for its geologic history.  The only constant is change.  To cite rising temperatures as proof of man-made damage to our ecosystem (or climate change when such volatility is constant) during a naturally occurring warming period is an act of either intellectual incompetence or dishonesty.

I acknowledge that the most likely retort to my observation would be the assertion that the earth’s temperature is rising faster than normal or that climate change is becoming more volatile than historically expected.  I accept that these statistically significant observations would be compelling.  But despite my concerted efforts to find publically available evidence, I have yet to encounter a compelling case that current climate trends are anything other than normal.  (Should anyone reading this know of such a resource I would enthusiastically review it)

I challenge the assertion that man has even possessed the ability to quantify global temperatures long enough to capture statistically significant observations.  Our modern scientific technology has existed for less than a blink of an eye in geologic terms.  The Earth could warm or cool for 10,000 years in the context of a broader trend opposite this observation.  How would human beings who invented the functional light bulb only 130 years ago interpret these trends?

10 year, 100 year and even 1,000 year periods are virtually irrelevant to broader global temperature trends.  Anyone who draws attention to annual or decade-long periods to prove or disprove global temperature trends is uninformed.

I am not a so-called “denier”.  I accept the theoretical possibility of man-made global warming.  But I have never seen evidence that humans are the cause of our present warming period or that this trend is dangerous to a global ecosystem that has proven resilient to far more cataclysmic events than man.

Given an understanding of temperature trends for the last 18,000 any reasonable person would expect the first decade of this millennium to be warmer than the last (1000-1010) and for the first decade of the next millennium (3000-3010) to be warmer than the present.  Citing this expected observation as proof of Geocentric Global Warming is absurd.

Dismal Reality

Cap and Trade Legislation would be an unnecessarily damaging, misguided response to Global Warming even if it were proven science.  Imposing wealth destroying, job limiting constraints on economic activity based on an unproven theory, which if even valid may be irrelevant, is an act of insanity at best and self-immolation at worst.