Melting of the Ice-Cap

Introduction

The Earth is heating up; the polar ice caps are melting; more fresh water from melting glaciers is changing the ocean currents; there are droughts in Africa; rising ocean levels are flooding low-lying lands. Is this all true or are scientists just going off the deep end? A friend and I had a discussion about all this recently. He is firmly convinced that man-made pollutants are causing the Earth to warm and that unless drastic measures are taken we are all doomed. Now, I am not one of those people who take conventional wisdom at face value. After all, just 600 years ago conventional wisdom held that the world was flat, and just 500 years ago doctors were using leeches to suck blood from ailing patients.

It was only 150 years ago that, according to conventional wisdom, man would never be able to fly. And some 30 years ago, when a European doctor argued that ulcers were caused by bacteria he was ridiculed. Conventional wisdom said otherwise. So when I decided to look into climate change I didn't want to deal with theories, I wanted proof--hard facts, accurate statistics. If indeed humans were the driving force behind this doomsday climate-change scenario, then old weather records should provide evidence. So I decided to get a sampling of those records to begin my investigation.

I would begin at 200,000 years B.C. and move forward from there. If I could get daily high/low temperature and precipitation statistics from that era, I would have a good starting point. But when I started looking for daily statistics worldwide from 200,000 B.C. to 199,900 B.C., I found they were not available. I don't know if they were burned in some volcanic explosion or were destroyed during the most recent Ice Age or what. They were just not available (Forster et al, 2001, pp: 85).

That bothered me. Even going back 200,000 years does not provide an accurate weather-pattern log for a planet estimated to be 4.5 billion years old. Even that would be like taking a grain of sand from the Sahara Desert and trying to determine the soil makeup in Alaska. But if I had to move forward, I would. So I decided to check the daily worldwide weather statistics for the 100-year period between 70,000 B.C. and 69,900 B.C.

To my astonishment, they were not available either. How would I be able to conduct a valid investigation with no starting point? Again I moved forward and tried to locate daily statistics for the years from 17,000 B.C. to 16,900 B.C. Still no such records were available.

I couldn't even find statistics from 3,000 B.C. until 2,900 B.C. or from A.D. 800 to 900. What was the National Weather Service doing back then? Why wasn't it keeping daily statistics?

The earliest daily weather statistics I could find began in the 1870s, and they were only for selected spots in the United States. There was nothing worldwide.

Now, if statistics for a 100-year period between 200,000 B.C. and 199,900 B.C. are a spit in the ocean for a 4.5 billion-year-old planet's climate, 135 years ...