I have no doubt about the truth of global warming. I just wonder how much of this is part of the natural cycle of the earth. There have been several so called Ice Ages, with periods of relative warmth separating them. This has been going on for millions of years. Animals become extinct in these cycles, being unable to endure the climatic conditions. Polar ice caps advance and cover continents, then recede scouring the earth as they go, creating scarred topographic features that slowly soften over the years, and everyone forgets how they occurred in the first place. We had global warming when the human population of the earth was less than 100,000. Indeed, we probably had it before the arrival of homo sapiens.

Scientists tell us that there is an inexorable warming trend occurring. Our sun is getting hotter, and hotter, and becoming larger and larger. A completely natural course of events in the life of a star, our star (sun) being no different than any other. Eventually, because of the expansion of the suns diameter, and resulting increasing ambient temperatures, earth will become uninhabitable. Indeed, earth and probably the rest of the galaxy which earth is a part of, is doomed to eventual melting into a molten mass of rock, before the sun burns itself out, and dies.

I am not saying that we, 6+ billion of us, are not aiding and abetting the current cycle of global warming; I’m just saying that it might well have happened anyway, regardless of what Al Gore says about it.

When I was working in sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-1980’s, I spent some time in Chad, on a highway program. During one of my visits there, I got up to visit Lake Chad. At least that was the intent. We never found the lake. It had dried up into an unrecognizable scrubby waste land. Even the elephants had moved on to greener pastures in nearby Niger. It turns out that Lake Chad has gone through several geologically verifiable periods of shrinking, and then expanding, all due to natural environmental cycles of change.

In Syria, the flat almost featureless expanse of arid land in the north is broken only by the Euphrates river flowing out of Turkey on its way to Baghdad in nearby Iraq. The abandoned walled city of Recife, the ruined city enclosed by remarkable rose quartz walls, found just off the present highway from Aleppo to Raqqa, and the Iraq border, was once surrounded by lush forested land, and the camel caravans on their way to Constantinople from China wound their way through the forests, according to written records of that time. During the time of the Roman occupation of the Holy Land, they built large cities such as Palmyra in western Syria, now lying in ruins, covered by drifting sands in the empty waste land of NW Syria. Some of these ruins can only be seen from satellites, their outlines under the sands being visible from outer space.

So major changes in climate and environment, lasting changes, have been going on for millennia, and will continue to go on despite whatever any of us do. I suspect it would be something akin to stopping the Niagara river before it makes its plunge over the falls.

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