Global Warming

Fossil Coral (Miocene) from Zanzibar

There's a lot of unnecessary clap-trap talked about global warming.  By that I'm not talking about the patently hilarious, visually stunning scenarios presented by the overblown Hollywood offering The Day After Tomorrow, or the similarly hilarious attempt by ex-vice-president Al Gore to present himself as some sort of eco-warrior (eco-crusader?  eco-messiah?), well intentioned as it was.  I'm not even talking about the barely concealed climate change denial exhibited on an infrequent basis on Top Gear.

No, what I'm talking about is the oft recycled argument that global warming has happened many times in the past and therefore it's not our fault.  The issue here is not whether it has happened in the past or not, the issue is are we a contributing factor.

Many or the people who are the strongest proponents of this point of view are the same American Christian Right-Wing oil baron types who also insist that evolution is a bunch of hogwash and the Lord made the heavens and Earth in six days before taking a break and having a Kit Kat on the 7th - the irony here being that on the one hand they condemn the science of Evolution, and on the other they misuse the scientific evidence of sequence stratigraphy and paleontology to justify their assertion that there is no need to change their wasteful and destructive ways.

The fossil coral in the picture above is from one of those warmer periods in the Earths history - about 25 million years ago - It tells a tale of warm shallow seas, close to a river delta, but the rock strata from which this fossil came also tells a tale of the time scale over which this warming trend happened - tens of millions of years!  By comparison, it has taken about 300 years to warm the Earth in a similar manner since the start of the industrial revolution.  And we have absolutely nothing to do with it?  Really?