Addressing such nonsense Friday was London-based geological-, biological-, and political-history researcher Don Stewart.
In an article published at PR-GB.com, Stewart mocked the hysteria surrounding England's floods, and pointed out how history actually shows them to be neither of biblical proportion nor in any way caused by anthropogenic global warming (emphasis added throughout):
"[If the floods of England and the fires of Europe this July were of Biblical proportions, no one would be around to report them nor read nor see the reports." Mr Stewart continued, "to say such events, harsh as they are on the very unfortunate people afflicted by them, are of ‘Biblical proportions', trivialises the former and the latter". He said, "those affected are not helped by such headlines which should be factual not emotive, whereas the Hebrew Biblical writers who passed on to us the trauma they witnessed, in ages past, effectively lose their credibility".
Credibility a concern of journalists? Nah.
Moving forward, Stewart then discussed how disasters addressed in the Old Testament have since been confirmed by scientific and historical observations:
"The first such cataclysm dated by the Bible, 'The Flood of Noah' or 'The Great Flood' was in circa 2450 BC and explains why the ice caps (formed in its aftermath as the waters were dried up into massive ice-stocks over the poles and mountain ranges by raging winds) have now almost completely melted away. The residual ice caps and glaciers we see today have shrunk considerably since 2450 BC. Furthermore, British reports from navigators and explorers since Elizabethan times show that there has been a significant retreat since those first empirical observations available to us from their logs written up to 200 years before the Industrial Revolution that is often falsely blamed for global warming" Mr Stewart claims, "The 'Agricultural' or 'Agrarian' Revolution which financed the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, was itself made possible by significant warming that Britain was experiencing by 1700 AD."
What about man's role?
"Although the pollution of 200 years of carbon-based industrial activity may have contributed a miniscule factor, either reducing or increasing the already-rising atmospheric temperatures, the globe's own natural heat from molten lava and iron at its core, in addition to the Sun's rays heating the atmosphere, means that the ice caps could not exist forever anyway and in fact now look like disappearing altogether within 4500 years (2450 BC - 2050 AD) of their formation."
So what's happening in England right now?
"From a Biblical perspective, model or way of explaining events, the latest floods in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire, probably do signify global warming", however, Mr Stewart warned, "at the moment, we really have insufficient empirical evidence to conclude that is true." He explained, "the world has to go through these last stages of ice-melt and like earlier stages this will cause less intense, intense or even very intense fluctuations around norms that we come to accept with the aid of regular measurements every 50 years or so. But the norms we are familiar with in 2007 AD are not necessarily similar to 12th century England or even 8th century BC England when the ice caps were much closer to the British Isles (to the Arctic Circle or even further south) than they are now (well inside the Arctic Circle). Unfortunately but realistically, under these circumstances, empirical data from one era may not be relevant to that of any other era even 50 years later".
Stewart then connected past and present to offer an interesting explanation of what is going on with today's weather:
In the immediate aftermath of the Great Flood, the North Polar Arctic Ocean was a seething cauldron of tectonic disturbance so that the waters of the ocean were far too warm to let snow settle as it did on Antarctica's land-mass. Instead, the snow initially fell over the land masses of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia then back-filled as the Arctic ocean cooled down relative to the warming land masses to the south and as the crust seems to have stabilised a bit more. This created the false impression in the geological record of a second ice-age when all that was really happening was a redistribution of the mass of snow and ice as warming conditions from the south melted the snow which formed heavy clouds that precipitated (rained or snowed) over the Arctic Ocean, stranding Eskimos and bears there. Mr Stewart suggested, "England in recent days has experienced a mini-repeat of that process as tectonic disturbances that may have begun around the time of the Indian Ocean Tsunami a couple of years ago, and which are currently bothering scientists overlooking Antarctica's land surface from outer space satellites, are at the moment exacerbating the Earth's natural warming processes, and causing more ice than 'usual' to calve off the ice masses and vaporise into more rain-laden clouds, as Earth returns to its pre-Noahic Flood ambience".
Fascinating. Finally, Stewart threw some mysteriously cold water at the United Nations:
Mr Stewart said the Inter-Governmental Panels on Climate-Change are massively understating the true picture and ignoring many situations, although vital information may have been withheld from the appointed scientists who in effect only concentrate on irrelevant side-issues." Mr Stewart said that from his own research and with information he had gleaned from the NZ Ministry of Science and United States Embassy he had "warned one of England's environmental agencies of the problems of modern climate-change theory over a year ago but its elected President ignored him".
Yeah. There's a lot of that going around.
